Distributed MPC for Thermal Comfort and Load Allocation with Energy Auction

Abstract

This paper presents a distributed predictive control methodology for indoor thermal comfort that optimizes the consumption of a limited shared energy resource using an integrated demand-side management approach that involves a power price auction plus an appliance loads allocation scheme. The control objective for each subsystem (house or building) aims to minimize the energy cost while maintaining the indoor temperature inside comfort limits. In a distributed coordinated multi-agent ecosystem, each house or building control agent achieves its objectives while sharing, among them, the available energy through the introduction of particular coupling constraints in their underlying optimization problem. Coordination is maintained by a daily green energy auction bring in a demand-side management approach. The implemented distributed MPC algorithm is described and validated with simulation studies.