This paper sheds light on a promising and very active research area for electricity market modeling, that is, agent-based computational economics. The intriguing perspective of such research methodology is to succeed in tackling the complexity of the electricity market structure, thus the fast-growing literature appeared in the last decade on this field. This paper aims to present the state-of-the-art in this field by studying the evolution and by characterizing the heterogeneity of the research issues, of the modeling assumptions and of the computational techniques adopted by the several research publications reviewed.