Multi-Agent Coordination of Thermostatically Controlled Loads by Smart Power Sockets for Electric Demand Side Management

TL;DR

This paper introduces a decentralized multi-agent control system using smart power sockets to coordinate thermostatically controlled loads, aiming to reduce peak demand and improve load smoothing without compromising user privacy.

Contribution

It proposes a novel multi-agent architecture with distributed estimation and consensus methods that operate solely on local measurements, ensuring privacy and robustness in demand side management.

Findings

Effective peak demand reduction demonstrated

Load smoothing achieved through decentralized control

Robustness to node/link failures confirmed

Abstract

This paper presents a multi-agent control architecture and an online optimization method based on 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 (DSM). 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, robust to node/link failure. The interactions among devices are designed to occur through an unstructured peer-to-peer (P2P) network over the internet. The architecture includes novel methods for parameter identification, state estimation and mixed logical modelling of TCLs and SPSs. It 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 an experimental validation.