Coordination of Heterogeneous Deferrable Loads using the F-MBC Mechanism

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the F-MBC mechanism's effectiveness in coordinating heterogeneous deferrable loads in realistic, dynamic scenarios, highlighting its strengths and areas for improvement in distributed energy resource management.

Contribution

The paper enhances simulation analysis of F-MBC, demonstrating its performance with diverse loads and renewable integration in realistic operational scenarios.

Findings

F-MBC performs well with high initial power consumption loads.

Performance with low initial power consumption loads is less satisfactory.

Identifies potential improvements for F-MBC in future applications.

Abstract

Increasing participation of prosumers in the electricity grid calls for efficient operational strategies for utilizing the flexibility offered by Distributed Energy Resources (DER) to match supply and demand. This paper investigates the coordination performance of a recently proposed coordination scheme for deferrable loads: Forecast Mediated Market Based Control (F-MBC). Enhancements are made to the simulation setup to enable an analysis of performance in realistic scenarios, with heterogeneous loads and an open-ended simulation horizon. Operational scenarios were formulated to showcase the ability of F-MBC to schedule heterogeneous populations of deferrable loads with dynamic load profiles, supported by a mix of renewable and flexible generation. Availability patterns of devices were generated to take into account varying user preferences. Simulation results indicate that F-MBC was able to achieve good distributed scheduling performance for devices with a high initial power consumption. However, performance for devices with low initial power consumption has been found to be less satisfactory. Several directions for further improvement of the F-MBC scheme and its applications are identified.