Abstract
This article presents a multi-agent control architecture and an online optimization method based on a dynamic average consensus to coordinate the power consumption of a large population of thermostatically controlled loads (TCLs). Our objective is to penalize peaks of power demand, smooth the load profile, and enable demand-side management. The proposed architecture and methods exploit only local measurements of power consumption via smart power sockets (SPSs) with no access to their internal temperature. No centralized aggregator of information is exploited, and agents preserve their privacy by cooperating anonymously only through consensus-based distributed estimation. The interactions among devices occur through an unstructured peer-to-peer (P2P) network over the Internet. Methods for parameter identification, state estimation, and mixed logical modeling of TCLs and SPSs are included. The architecture is designed from a multi-agent and plug-and-play perspective, in which existing household appliances can interact with each other in an urban environment. Finally, a novel low-cost testbed is proposed along with numerical tests and experimental validation.
Highlights
D EMAND-SIDE management (DSM) aims to manage the electric power demand to match baseload power generation, reducing the use of costly and polluting peaker power plants [1]
Statistics may vary depending on the country, in the USA, the 40% of the total electric demand is due to residential consumption [2] of which the largest share is due to electric heating and cooling achieved by the so-called thermostatically controlled loads (TCLs), such as water heaters, freezers, radiators, and air conditioners
The proposed method is paired with a multi-agent control architecture which is intended to exploit the cheapest possible hardware to enable cooperation among devices, i.e., a smart power socket (SPS), suitable to retrofit existing TCLs such as domestic water heaters, greatly reducing the cost of the infrastructure needed for the electric DSM program and significantly reducing the cost of adoption by the users
Summary
D EMAND-SIDE management (DSM) aims to manage the electric power demand to match baseload power generation, reducing the use of costly and polluting peaker power plants [1]. Manuscript received December 6, 2019; accepted February 9, 2020. Date of publication March 20, 2020; date of current version February 9, 2021. Manuscript received in final form February 11, 2020. The coordination of the power consumption of these TCLs during daily peaks of urban power consumption is crucial to reduce costs [3]. To provide some flexibility in controlling the urban power demand, several strategies that focus on actively modulating the ON/OFF power consumption profiles of TCLs to provide ancillary services to the grid have been proposed, see [5]–[8]
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