Towards designing an aggregator to activate the energy flexibility of multi-zone buildings using a hierarchical model-based scheme

Mahmood Khatibi, Samira Rahnama, Pierre Vogler-Finck, Jan Dimon Bendtsen and Alireza Afshari

Applied Energy, 2023, vol. 333, issue C, No S0306261922018190

Abstract: Aggregators are emerging players in the future power markets which aggregate the flexibility of small consumers. This paper proposes a hierarchical model-based scheme to activate the energy flexibility of multi-zone buildings through a direct aggregation mechanism. The novelty lies in considering the power market mechanism in which consumers try to remain committed to their bids without violating their desired comfort levels. In the proposed approach, a high-level control layer determines an hourly energy budget for the whole building according to price signals and reports it to an aggregator. A lower-level dispatch layer then distributes the pre-planned hourly energy budget among different zones. At this level, the emphasis is on keeping the energy consumption as close to the pre-planned budget as possible while satisfying the comfort requirements. In addition, this layer computes the available real-time up and down regulating power and reports them to the aggregator. For comparison, we develop both a centralized and a decentralized model predictive control (MPC) scheme for the high-level control layer. Furthermore, a decentralized MPC with variable prediction horizon is designed for the lower-level dispatch layer. The proposed method is applied to a detailed multi zone building model developed in a high-fidelity simulation environment. The results show that the proposed scheme can keep its commitment to the aggregator to a large extent (by more than 93%) while maintaining the desired comfort levels. In addition, it is seen that the centralized model reduces energy costs and exhibits between 0.5% and 2.5% better commitment to the pre-planned budget in comparison with the decentralized one at the cost of sacrificing comfort to some extent. Moreover, some preliminary results regarding available up and down regulating power for residential buildings are reported for the first time.

Keywords: Aggregator; HVAC systems; Multi zone building; Market mechanism; Flexibility; MPC (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261922018190
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:appene:v:333:y:2023:i:c:s0306261922018190

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 405891/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2022.120562

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan

More articles in Applied Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().