Organizations: IDLab, Ghent University – imec, Ghent, Belgium · Faculty of Technology, Policy & Management, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands · Beebop.ai, Belgium
In Europe, balance responsible parties can deliberately take out-of-balance positions to support transmission system operators (TSOs) in maintaining grid stability and earn profit, a practice called implicit balancing. Model predictive control (MPC) is widely adopted as an effective approach for implicit balancing. The balancing market model accuracy in MPC is critical to decision quality. Previous studies modeled this market using either (i) a convex market clearing approximation, ignoring proactive manual actions by TSOs and the market sub-quarter-hour dynamics, or (ii) machine learning methods, which cannot be directly integrated into MPC. To address these shortcomings, we propose a data-driven balancing market model integrated into MPC using an input convex neural network to ensure convexity while capturing uncertainties. To keep the core network computationally efficient, we incorporate attention-based input gating mechanisms to remove irrelevant data. Evaluating on Belgian data shows that the proposed model both improves MPC decisions and reduces computational time.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1 : The proposed implicit balancing framework.
Fig. 2 : The attention layer architecture used in the proposed market model.
Fig. 3 : The ICNN architecture.
Horizon
SI Forecast
Method
Profit (€/ MW/ QH)
All
∣SI∣≥ 20 MW
∣SI∣< 20 MW
1 QH
PF
Optimal
9.59
11.23
8.06
Clearing Approx.
8.01
9.89
6.27
Proposed
8.4 ± 0.08 *
10.43 ± 0.15
6.49 ± 0.14
Noise
Clearing Approx.
5.58
10.51
1.02
Proposed
7.68 ± 0.19
10.56 ± 0.15
4.99 ± 0.45
TABLE I : Imbalance profit for 1 MW/ 2 MWh battery on December 2023.
Fig. 4 : Price prediction error and the probability of idle action for 1 MW/ 2 MWh battery.
Battery
SI Forecast
Method
Profit (€/ MW/ QH)
All
∣SI∣≥ 20 MW
∣SI∣< 20 MW
10 MW/ 20 MWh
PF
Clearing Approx.
6.41
11.04
2.59
Proposed
6.93 ± 0.22 *
11.73 ± 0.37
2.98 ± 0.27
Noise
Clearing Approx.
3.54
10.51
− 2.36
Proposed
6.83 ± 0.18
11.72 ± 0.36
2.79 ± 0.22
50 MW/ 100 MWh
PF
Clearing Approx.
2.76
6.19
0.49
TABLE II : Imbalance profit for large batteries with 4 QH look-ahead horizon on December 2023.
Fig. 5 : Price prediction error and the probability of idle action for 50 MW/ 100 MWh battery.
Fig. 6 : The QH profit spread of the 50 MW battery for quarter hours with small SI (a) PF (b) noise.
Koopman-based neural MPC models generate time-varying dynamics from historical data, but preserve convexity by enforcing that the system operator is independent of the current control input. This conditional independence constraint limits adaptation to changing dynamics within a single MPC horizon, particularly under time-varying conditions and under stale-plan execution. We propose Bilinear Mamba-Koopman Neural MPC, a minimal extension that introduces control-dependent coupling in the latent dynamics, allowing the effective operator to adapt to the current input. The resulting model is a strict generalization of the standard linear, conditional-independence formulation, adds less than 1% parameters through a low-rank structure, and admits exact model Jacobians that enable efficient Sequential Convex Programming (SCP) with monotone-descent and KKT convergence results under standard trust-region assumptions. Across CartPole and RSCP benchmarks in time-invariant and time-varying regimes, the proposed model matches or improves forecasting accuracy on every cell when training noise is averaged out, with strict gains where control-state coupling is structurally present. Its main closed-loop gains appear in the RSCP TV task, where iterative SCP improves adaptation within the horizon and substantially stabilizes training; in CartPole TV, the gains are modest but consistent. In delayed re-planning experiments on the time-varying variants, the bilinear model degrades more gracefully under stale-plan execution, maintaining a consistent advantage on CartPole TV and a substantially larger robustness margin on RSCP TV. These results show that control-dependent latent dynamics provide a simple and effective mechanism for robust MPC under varying conditions.
Model predictive control is a high-performance control method, but it incurs comparatively high online computational costs across many control tasks and is challenging to realize in low-level hardware settings. To address this, we present a framework for generating neural network controllers that provably inherit the safety and stability guarantees of a robust model predictive policy. In contrast to approaches based on post-verification or additional online safety filters, our method provides constructive, a priori design conditions that ensure preservation of recursive feasibility and stability before deployment. We treat the approximation error as a bounded input disturbance, which is addressed in the MPC design. This allows the neural network controller to directly inherit robustness from the underlying model predictive controller, which enables the transfer of guarantees to the approximation. The design process is an offline, constructive synthesis pipeline and can be implemented once Lipschitz bounds are specified. We further demonstrate in simulation that the learned controller reproduces the closed-loop behavior of the original controller while reducing online computation.
Hendrik Alsmeier, Maik Pfefferkorn, Rolf Findeisen
Control and Cyber-Physical Systems Laboratory, Technical University of Darmstadt, Landgraf-Georg-Str. 4, 64283 Darmstadt, Germany
Accurate and efficient imbalance electricity price forecasting is critical for industrial energy trading systems, especially as battery assets and automated bidding pipelines increasingly participate in balancing markets. However, real-time forecasting is complicated by nonlinear market-rule-based price formation, heterogeneous input signals, and incomplete data availability caused by communication delays, publication lags, and measurement outages. This paper proposes a market-rule-informed neural forecasting framework that embeds imbalance price formation rules into the latent space of an expressive neural network. The proposed framework preserves raw signal information while exploiting transparent market-rule priors. We further analyze operational robustness by removing price-component information and characterize how forecasting performance scales with input length and forecasting horizon. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieves competitive forecasting performance with substantially fewer trainable parameters and shorter training time than generic deep learning baselines. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieves competitive forecasting performance with substantially fewer trainable parameters and shorter training time than generic deep learning baselines, demonstrating that market-rule priors and expressive neural networks should be jointly used for accurate and computationally sustainable forecasting in industrial energy trading applications. The implementation is publicly available at https://runyao-yu.github.io/MRINN/.
Runyao Yu, Julia Lin, Derek W. Bunn +6
Delft University of Technology · Austrian Institute of Technology · London Business School +2