An Internet trading network is operated by establishing supplier memberships of suppliers providing offerings to the trading network; establishing customer memberships of customers providing volume commitments; consolidating all volume commitments for a particular commodity or service when negotiating an offering with the supplier; managing memberships and their accounts.

A method and system for dispatching available generation resources to supply a given load in a control area. Generating units are each assigned a temporal trajectory of output power over consecutive time intervals. The allocation of available resources are assigned so as to minimize costs associated with meeting changing loads.

In accordance with a first aspect of the instant invention, there is provided a method of gas pool balancing which provides a method of simultaneously and systematically balancing an entire gas transmission network. In a first embodiment, the instant method operates by identifying pools with input amounts of gas available, numerically distributing that gas throughout a representation of the gas network, and, thereafter, physically distributing gas in that network according to the solution obtained. In another embodiment, the instant method operates by forming a system of equations that define the topology of the gas transmission network. Solution of the resulting system of equations yields a rapid and accurate system-wide solution to the gas balancing problem which heretofore was solved by repeated iterations of an algorithm which balanced one pool at a time.