Potential of Model-Free Control for Demand-Side Management Considering Real-Time Pricing

This paper presents a detailed description of data predictive control (DPC) applied to a demand-side energy management system. Different from traditional model-based predictive control (MPC) algorithms, this approach introduces two model-free algorithms of artificial neural network (ANN) and random forest (RF) to make control strategy predictions on system operation, while avoiding the huge cost and effort associated with learning a grey/white box model of the physical system. The operating characteristics of electrical appliances, system energy consumption, and users' comfort zones are also considered in the selected energy management system based on a real-time electricity pricing system. Case studies consisting of two scenarios (0% and 15% electricity price fluctuation) are delivered to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Simulation results demonstrate that the DPC controller based on ANN pays only 0.18% additional bill cost to maintain users' comfort zones and system economy standardization while using only 0.096% optimization time cost compared with the MPC controller.