Designing interruptible load management scheme based on customer performance using mechanism design theory

Abstract

Interruptible load management (ILM), as an important incentive-based demand response (DR) program, plays a critical role in power system operation. An improved ILM scheme design method is proposed in the paper. From the perspective of social welfare, the scheme design is described as an optimization problem, and then mechanism design theory is adopted for solving. The novel idea presented in the paper is that the customer baseline load (CBL) is used to parameterize the type of customer (TOC), which is fundamental information for application of mechanism design theory. Being private information, TOC is not directly attainable, but CBL can be estimated based on historical load data (namely the customer performance), and it can reflect the customers’ rational judgments in self-benefit decisions. Firstly, the validity of adopting CBL to determine TOC is demonstrated. Then, the load curtailing potential constraints and the objective function are rebuilt in the expression of CBL correspondingly, so that the mechanism design theory successfully works with CBL instead of TOC. Moreover, adjustment strategies are also proposed to cope with the possible unenforceable scheme scenarios, thus the practicability of the designed scheme is ensured. Finally, simulations are carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.