Abstract
The ongoing decentralization of the electrical power system encompasses the installation of residential electrical loads and generators, such as electro-thermal heating devices. Clusters of these devices in combination with thermal storage can play a significant role in future power system control as they introduce load and generation flexibility into the system. Hence, control concepts which are attractive for both power system level and end user side are required. This work proposes a novel decentralized scheduling approach for electro-thermal heating devices based on a multi-agent system architecture. As a major novelty, the approach addresses both of the aforementioned appeals on two levels without central control. First, local planning with individual objectives is performed. Second, the heating devices cooperate to find the combination of local plans serving best a given energy system objective. This approach is fully decentralized and has a strong end user involvement. The performance of the proposed approach related to end user and system level objectives is compared to that of centralized approaches. Simulation results show that the new method can successfully satisfy end user objectives and provide energy fluctuation balancing. Finally, drawbacks compared to centralized scheduling are analyzed.
Highlights
The current transition towards a more sustainable energy system entails significant changes to the structure of the power system
For the control and management of these future power systems, several decentralized concepts based on Multi-Agent System (MAS) architectures have been proposed in the literature (Cai, Kim, Jaramillo, Braun, & Hu, 2016; Eddy, Gooi, & Chen, 2015; Harb et al, 2015; Jun, Junfeng, Jie, & Ngan, 2010; Li, Logenthiran, & Woo, 2015; Ramchurn, Vytelingum, Rogers, & Jennings, 2011; Xu, Liu, & Gong, 2011; Yang & Wang, 2013; Zhao, Suryanarayanan, & Simoes, 2013)
We introduce the concept of an energy remainder to assess the energy profile that results from the scheduling of heating devices in the cluster
Summary
The current transition towards a more sustainable energy system entails significant changes to the structure of the power system. The problem of combining these two possibly contradicting fields of interests in a single control concept where – in contrast to Harb et al (2015) – no central decision unit is required in the MAS is only rarely addressed in the literature Both sides, the power system as well as the end user DERs, are interdependent in future energy supply systems as one side cannot achieve a satisfying control result without the other side cooperating. This work presents a novel agent-based control approach for a cluster of electro-thermal heating devices in place of DERs that considers both the local objectives of DERs and a general SLO. An agent schedules the heating device for 24 h ahead on the following two levels (Fig. 2):
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
