  A distributed, hierarchical, market based approach is introduced to solve the
economic dispatch problem. The approach requires only a minimal amount of
information to be shared between a central market operator and the end-users.
Price signals from the market operator are sent down to end-user device agents,
which in turn respond with power schedules. Intermediate congestion agents make
sure that local power constraints are satisfied and any potential congestion is
avoided by adding local pricing differences. Our results show that in 20% of
the evaluated scenarios the solutions are identical to the global optimum when
perfect knowledge is available. In the other 80% the results are not
significantly worse, while providing a higher level of scalability and
increasing the consumer's privacy.
