  In a growing retail electricity market, demand response (DR) is becoming an
integral part of the system to enhance economic and operational performances.
This is rendered as incentive-based DR (IBDR) in the proposed study. It
presents a bi-level decision framework under the ambit of multiple demand
response providers (DRPs) in the retail competition. It is formulated as a
multi-leader-multi-follower game, where multiple DRPs, as the DR stakeholders,
are strategically interacting to optimize load serving entity cost at the upper
level, and individual DRP as the aggregated customers is optimizing its cost at
the lower level. The strategic behavior of DRPs is modeled in a game-theoretic
framework using a generalized Stackelberg game. Further, the existence and
uniqueness of the game are validated using variational inequalities. It is
presented as a nonlinear problem to consider AC network constraints. An
equilibrium problem with equilibrium constraints is used as a mathematical
program to model the multi-leader-multi-follower, bi-level problem, which is
simultaneously solved for all DRPs. The diagonalization method is employed to
solve the problem. The detailed numerical analyses are conducted on IEEE 33-bus
test and Indian-108 bus distribution systems to demonstrate the applicability
and scalability of the proposed model and the suggested method.
