A Hierarchical MARL-Based Approach for Coordinated Retail P2P Trading and Wholesale Market Participation of DERs

The ongoing shift towards decentralization of the electric energy sector, driven by the growing electrification across end-use sectors, and widespread adoption of distributed energy resources (DERs), necessitates their active participation in the electricity markets to support grid operations. Furthermore, with bi-directional energy and communication flows becoming standard, intelligent, easy-to-deploy, resource-conservative demand-side participation is expected to play a critical role in securing power grid operational flexibility and market efficiency. This work proposes a market engagement framework that leverages a hierarchical multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MARL) approach to enable individual prosumers to participate in peer-to-peer retail auctions and further aggregate these intelligent prosumers to facilitate effective DER participation in wholesale markets. Ultimately, a Stackelberg game is proposed to coordinate this hierarchical MARL-based DER market participation framework toward enhanced market performance.