Analysis of the feasibility region of hierarchical flexibility coordination schemes

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the properties of timecoupled flexibility potentials and a method for analysing modelling and aggregation errors in hierarchical flexibility coordination schemes through synthetically generated flexibility demand timeseries. Central to the method is the generation of a uniform sampling of the flexibility potential's feasible operating region. To that end, an interpretation of the convex solution space is conceived as an n-dimensional polytope and sampled using two different methods. It is shown that a sampling method based on markov-chains is better suited to generate feasible samples in complex flexibility potentials with timecoupling constraints than a rejection sampling method that requires a rectangular bounding-box around the n-dimensional description of the flexibility potential. We also show that assessments of flexibility coordination schemes should be done across the entire feasibility region and not be limited to the convex hull as coordination metrics, such as the aggregation error, are non-uniform across the feasibility region.