AEE Lab MISO Electricity Experiment Installation Instructions

System Requirements

Both the server and client programs are written in Java and works on Windows and Linux platforms. The software comes with an embedded web server and does NOT need the Apache web server to run.

You will need to have the following installed in order to run this experiment:

Server Machine

Client Machines

  • Java Runtime Environment 1.5 or higher
  • Web browser with Java enabled

Server Set-up

  • The server and client programs are packaged in one zipped file and can be downloaded from here. Unpack the files to a directory on your computer. 
  • Navigate to the directory and double-click on "start-server.bat" to run.  This will open a Windows terminal with the message "Press ctrl-c to terminate this server" and you will see the server Control Panel (Figure 1). 

Figure 1. Server Control Panel

  • Click on "Settings " in the Control Panel to allow you to specify the initialisation file to use and output directory (Figure 2). The sample init file is named "conf/init.xml" and the default output directory is "data/output". Click on "Save Settings"  to save any changes you make.

Figure 2. Changing Settings on Server Control Panel

  • Click on "Load Config" to load the initialisation file. The control panel will reflect the changes (Figure 3). If you loaded init.xml, the experiment will run with four sellers and four buyers. The program will also load Matlab.

Figure 3. Control Panel after loading initialisation file init.xml

  • The server is now ready to accept connections from eight participant clients. 

Client Set-up

  • Open a web browser in your client machine. It is recommended you test that the server and client programs can communicate with each other by running both programs on the same machine first before using remote machines. This will eliminate all other points of failure such as network problems and firewalls.
  • On the web browser, type in http://<server's IP address>:4080 on the URL field.  If  you are running the client and server on the same machine, the URL will be "http://localhost:4080".  Note that here localhost denotes the machine you want to connect to, and 4080 specifies the port number.
  • The client web page will load the java program and you will see a login page (Figure 4). If your browser warns you that you are running software which cannot be verified, click "Run" to continue loading the client.

Figure 4. Client Login Screen

  • Type in your name, e-mail address and student code and choose the participant code. Depending on the type of participant you choose, you will see either Seller trading screen (Figure 5) or Buyer trading screen (Figure 6).

Figure 5. Seller trading screen

Figure 6. Buyer trading screen

  • The information on the server's control panel will change as each participant logs in to reflect their status. 

  • Once all participants have logged in, the experiment can begin by clicking the "Start" button on the server's control panel.

Additional Notes

  • All participants must be logged in before the experiment can commence. 
  • If you wish to run the clients on remote machines, you will need to know the IP address of the server machine. You can find this out by opening a command prompt (Windows "Start" => "Run" => Open "cmd") and typing ipconfig on the terminal. Replace localhost with this IP address in the URL field above to access the client program remotely using your web browser.

Last Modified: 17 October 2007

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