Calibrated uncertainty quantification for prosumer flexibility aggregation in ancillary service markets

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scalable uncertainty quantification framework combining Monte Carlo dropout and conformal prediction to produce calibrated prediction intervals for prosumer flexibility, improving reliability in ancillary service market bidding.

Contribution

It develops a novel MCD-CP framework that enhances uncertainty calibration for prosumer flexibility forecasting, addressing data limitations and heterogeneity.

Findings

MCD-CP achieves reliable coverage and controlled conservatism.

Standalone MCD overestimates flexibility and violates P90 standards.

Conformalised methods reduce overbidding and improve profit by up to 70%.

Abstract

Reliable forecasting of prosumer flexibility is critical for demand response aggregators participating in frequency controlled ancillary services market, where strict reliability requirements such as the P90 standard are enforced. Limited historical data, dependence on exogeneous factors, and heterogenous prosumer behaviour introduce significant epistemic uncertainty, making deterministic or poorly calibrated probabilistic models unsuitable for market bidding. This paper proposes the use of scalable uncertainty quantification framework that integrates Monte Carlo dropout (MCD) with conformal prediction (CP) to produce calibrated, finite sample prediction intervals for aggregated prosumer flexibility. The proposed framework is applied to a behind-the-meter aggregator participating in the Danish manual frequency restoration reserve capacity market. A large-scale synthetic dataset is generated using a modified industry-grade home energy management system, combined with publicly available load, solar, price, activation and device-level data. The resulting machine learning surrogate model captures aggregate prosumer price responsiveness and provides uncertainty-aware estimates suitable for market bidding. Multiple multivariate CP strategies are evaluated and benchmarked against conventional MCD-based methods. Results show that standalone MCD systematically overestimates available flexibility and violates P90 compliance, whereas the proposed MCD-CP framework achieves reliable coverage with controlled conservatism. When embedded in aggregator bidding model, conformalised methods substantially reduce overbidding risk and achieve upto 70% of perfect-information profit while satisfying regulatory reliability constraints, providing practical, computationally efficient, and market-compliant solution for aggregator flexibility forecasting under uncertainty.