Application of deep reinforcement learning in electricity demand response market: Demand response decision-making of load aggregator

Abstract

With the large-scale integration of renewable energy generation, developing the potential of demand response is becoming more and more significant. However, the number of consumers is huge, the electricity consumption behaviors are various and the information of consumers is incomplete, thus there are great difficulties in modeling and processing demand response by the conventional mathematical methods. Therefore, how to accurately predict the response behaviors of consumers and select the appropriate consumers for demand response is worthy of in-depth discussion. In this paper, the decision-making method of the load aggregators who participant in demand response market on behalf of the small and medium-sized consumers based on Deep Q-network algorithm is proposed, supporting the aggregators to properly guide the potential demand response consumers. At the same time, a dynamic consumer classification method based on self-organizing maps algorithm is also proposed, supporting the aggregators to accurately predict the response behaviors of the consumers. Simulation results show that the proposed method can effectively realize the classification of the consumers and result in a more beneficial demand response.•The proposed method does not require complete information, such as demand response behavior parameters of the consumers.•Self-organizing maps can realize a dynamic classification of demand response consumers as the case may be.•DQN algorithm can effectively realize the demand response decision-making of aggregators under the condition of incomplete information.