Making some adjustments to the planning

(I wrote this post a couple of days ago, only now got the opportunity to put it online).
Due to some (unforseen) personal issues, I couldn't work full time on my thesis the past couple of days. Although I'm still going to try reach the goals I had set before; I will be making some minor adjustments to the planning. First of all, I will write some parts of the more introductory chapters of my thesis that answer questions such as:

• what is the problem this thesis tries to solve ?
• what are the (dis)analogies with the electricity market models?
• why different types of markets/auctions exists?

Doing this will give me the feeling that I'm getting more work done, since writing these 'context'-chapters is generally easier than writing about my own market model. The fact that writing the chapter about the market model itself progresses slowly is caused by the fact that the model is not complete yet. That is, although I believe that the current model already has some interesting features and ideas, a few critical points remain to be adressed (primarily; the issue of Price Discovery) properly. Already having done some writing about the model, I think the clarifying these issues first is the way to go. Of course, I'll continue working on the chapter; but I'll take more time to evaluate some of the markets components while writing.

Concerning price discovery, I have already a few ideas; but I haven't been able to address the "variable" priced components (such as outgoing bandwidth, etc) yet. Once I have a more complete picture, I'll create a small powerpoint presentation  and put that online.

On a side note, I have continued working on the (evolutionary) market prototype. At this point, all different components (market, consumers, providers) are actual webservices that communicate through WSDL/SOAP. I also managed to get a single service running on Amazon EC2 (this will come in handy, when I want to demo the prototype), but I haven't tested the whole setup on EC2 yet.

'Till next time :-)