Practical Challenges in Real-Time Demand Response

We report on a real-time demand response experiment with 100 controllable devices. The experiment reveals several key challenges in the deployment of a real-time demand response program, including time delays, uncertainties, characterization errors, multiple timescales, and nonlinearity, which have been largely ignored in previous studies. To resolve these practical issues, we develop and implement a two-level multi-loop control structure integrating feed-forward proportional-integral controllers and optimization solvers in closed loops, which eliminates steady-state errors and improves the dynamical performance of the overall building response. The proposed methods are validated by Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) tests.

Automated summary

The study reports on a real-time demand response experiment with 100 controllable devices, identifying key challenges in the deployment of such programs. To address these challenges, a two-level multi-loop control structure integrating feed-forward proportional-integral controllers and optimization solvers in closed loops was developed and implemented to improve the overall building response dynamical performance. The proposed methods were validated through Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) tests.