Optimal Dispatch of Air Conditioner Loads in Southern China Region by Direct Load Control

This paper proposes a novel direct load control model for scheduling the air conditioner loads (ACLs) in the Southern China region. The model has two objectives: 1) to minimize the total deviations between the total scheduled and instructed shed ACLs over the entire dispatch horizon; and 2) to minimize the disturbance of the residents' thermal comfort. The primary contribution of this paper is to employ an International Organization of Standard thermal comfort model to precisely estimate the residents' thermal comfort degree. The secondary contribution of this paper is to propose a new optimization algorithm called fuzzy adaptive imperialist competitive algorithm to effectively solve the model. A case study including three major cities in Southern China is conducted to verify the efficiency of the proposed method.