Abstract
Cross-border energy markets are becoming more relevant and line congestions may cause significant modifications in their underlined bidding strategies, increasing the market power. This environment requires the development of new tools to measure biased behaviors, and also to try to mitigate them. The related literature makes use of techniques to simulate the bidding strategies, mostly based in optimization models, with or without equilibrium constraints, or mixed complementary problems, and embedded in ad-hoc iterative procedures. This paper presents a model for a two areas system, assuming a conjectural equilibrium. A Mixed Integer Programming method has been implemented to solve the equilibrium conditions, where a binary variable is used to represent the line's power flow status (congested or not) between both two areas. Instead of an ad-hoc algorithm, the Branch and Bound algorithm is used for the resolution, which can assure convergence in specific situations where previous algorithms may diverge. © 2014 IEEE.

Abstract
The technical and economic importance of electricity ancillary services, responsible for guaranteeing the reliability and security of the power systems, is growing due to the continuous penetration of intermittent technologies. Indeed, changes in the net demand are forcing more expensive thermal generation to provide reserves while reducing their energy production. Therefore generation companies' are more and more concerned with reserve markets and their impact on the electricity market forecasting models. This paper analyses historical data from the Spanish electricity market to better understand and forecast secondary reserve requirements and real-time secondary reserve usage. It focuses on the relationship between secondary reserve requirements by the System Operator and the secondary reserve finally cleared, the long term evolution of secondary reserve requirements with respect to the intermittent generation growing, their annual and daily seasonalities, the real-time secondary reserve usage and its annual and daily seasonalities, and some additional hints for the requirements forecasting. Several interesting and not always intuitive conclusions are drawn from the analyzed data. © 2014 IEEE.

Abstract
Supply Function Equilibrium (SFE) and Conjectured Supply Function Equilibrium (CSFE) are some of the approaches most used to model electricity markets in the medium and long term. SFE represents the generators' strategies with functions that link prices and quantities, but leads to systems of differential equations hard to solve, unless linearity is assumed (Linear Supply Function Equilibrium, LSFE). CSFE also assumes linearity of the supply functions but only around the equilibrium point, also avoiding the system of differential equations. This paper analyzes the existence and uniqueness of G-CSFE (a CSFE previously proposed by the Authors) for both elastic and inelastic demands. In addition, it also proves that the iterative algorithm proposed to compute G-CSFE has a fixed point structure and is convergent, and that LSFE is a particular case of G-CSFE when demand and marginal costs are linear. Selected examples show the performance of G-CSFE and how it can be applied to market power analysis with meaningful results.

Abstract
The continuous penetration of intermittent technologies is gradually reinforcing the technical and economic importance of electricity ancillary services, which are responsible for guaranteeing the reliability and security of the power systems. Generation companies', regulating entities, system operators and other institutions (such as researchers on these fields) are more and more concerned on using market models to forecast most relevant outcomes for particular markets (such as energy and reserves cleared quantities and prices), under different simulation scenarios (such as costs or demand) and under different markets structures (such as more competitive or more oligopolistic). This paper reviews most energy and reserve markets implementations (mainly focusing on reserve types and dispatching methods), and discusses different approaches to model them. A theoretical equilibrium model for energy and reserve markets is also proposed.

Abstract
Balancing services are used for maintaining the continuous balance between generation and load in the system and keep the frequency stable on its nominal value. The demand for balancing services is increasing with the growing penetration of wind generation into the electricity industry. It is clearly seen that a major challenge of the coming environment for the electricity market is reducing the procurement cost of balancing services. This paper presents a probabilistic spot market model based on integration of day-ahead spot market and the real-time balancing market which aims to trade off preventive actions in the day-ahead spot market with corrective actions in the real-time balancing market. The proposed model is formulated as a bi-level optimization problem. To solve it, the inner optimization problem (reflecting the real-time balancing market) was substituted by its equivalent Karush-Kuhn-Tucker optimality conditions. Conventional spot market model is used as a benchmark in this study. The proposed and conventional spot market designs are applied to modified Nordic 32-bus example system. Comparison of results point out the benefits of the proposed approach over the traditional model.

Abstract
The ISTTOK tokamak was upgraded with a plasma control system based on the Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) standard. This control system was designed to improve the discharge stability and to extend the operational space to the alternate plasma current (AC) discharges as part of the ISTTOK scientific program. In order to accomplish these objectives all ISTTOK diagnostics and actuators relevant for real-time operation were integrated in the control system. The control system was programmed in C++ over the Multi-threaded Application Real-Time executor (MARTe) which provides, among other features, a real-time scheduler, an interrupt handler, an intercommunications interface between code blocks and a clearly bounded interface with the external devices. As a complement to the MARTe framework, the BaseLib2 library provides the foundations for the data, code introspection and also a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) server service. Taking advantage of the modular nature of MARTe, the algorithms of each diagnostic data processing, discharge timing, context switch, control and actuators output reference generation, run on well-defined blocks of code named Generic Application Module (GAM). This approach allows reusability of the code, simplified simulation, replacement or editing without changing the remaining GAMs. The ISTTOK control system GAMs run sequentially each 100 µs cycle on an Intel® Q8200 4-core processor running at 2.33 GHz located in the ATCA crate. Two boards (inside the ATCA crate) with 32 analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) were used for acquiring the diagnostics data. Each ADC operates at 2 Msample/s but (for real-time operation) the acquired data is decimated in real-time on the board's Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to a frequency defined by the control cycle time. This paper presents the ISTTOK real-time architecture and the human-machine Interface (HMI) for simplified AC discharge programming. © 2014 Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear.