EPIS, Inc., a leading software developer of modeling and forecasting tools for electric markets, has announced the release of AURORAxmp® v11.3. AURORAxmp is the industry's most comprehensive solution for power market resource/price forecasting, valuation, and analysis.

"AURORAxmp Version 11.3 offers several major enhancements to increase confidence in commitment and dispatching of units, LMP forecasting, and portfolio cost reporting," said John Scott, Chief Operating Officer at EPIS, Inc. AURORAxmp v11.3 provides a powerful new option to use a mixed-integer programming (MIP) optimization engine to solve unit commitment. When running large regions with multiple pools or systems, threading is used to simultaneously solve included pools and dramatically reduce run time. "This is ideal for applications like fuel budgeting, production costing, or when precise hourly unit commitment and dispatch patterns are needed for individual units," said Scott.

For nodal simulations, v11.3 users can now make use of generator shadow prices to inform the hourly commitment decisions with either economic (self) or reliability (pool) based commitment methods. The linear program which finds the optimal nodal solution each hour returns shadow prices for each generator, revealing the impact of running that generator on the total system cost. "It provides many benefits of a security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC) without the corresponding penalty in run-time," said Scott.

With v11.3, AURORAxmp now supports either MOSEK or Gurobi optimization engines. This gives users more choices in managing the trade-offs between speed and cost. For optimization-intensive runs, like the MIP-based commitment optimization, Gurobi, which is available as an option, shows a significant run-time advantage.

Some of the many other v11.3 enhancements announced by EPIS, include: Enhanced LT capacity expansion logic for more control in capacity price formation; a "load only" option for clear reporting of the cost associated with serving native load only in portfolios; a new enhancement to the uplift calculator that calculates the smallest uplift necessary to make all unit commitments whole; enhancements to calculate and report the marginal cost of losses across all branches in the system; and a more intuitive user interface that provides clearer organization for setting up a run.

About EPIS, Inc.

Headquartered in Sandpoint, Idaho with offices in West Linn, Oregon, Stuart, Florida, and Salt Lake City, Utah, EPIS, Inc. is the developer of the AURORAxmp® Electric Market Model, the industry's most trusted software package for reliable electric-market price forecasting, resource valuation and market-risk analysis. AURORAxmp is a power market simulation tool designed to forecast power prices over both the short-and long-term. At the core of the product, is an extremely fast, hourly-dispatch engine that simulates the dispatch of power plants in a chronological, multi-zone, transmission-constrained system. The software includes an input database provided by EPIS that can also be easily supplemented with the user's own data, or external data sources. First introduced in 1997, AURORAxmp is now the modeling tool of choice for power marketers, resource planners, regulatory agencies, financial analysts and energy consultants throughout the North America, Europe, Middle East and Asia. Visit www.epis.com.

EPIS, Inc.
Ben Thompson, 208-255-3984
benthompson@epis.com