English

Aggregation and Control of Populations of Thermostatically Controlled Loads by Formal Abstractions

Systems and Control 2013-07-31 v2 Optimization and Control Probability

Abstract

This work discusses a two-step procedure, based on formal abstractions, to generate a finite-space stochastic dynamical model as an aggregation of the continuous temperature dynamics of a homogeneous population of Thermostatically Controlled Loads (TCL). The temperature of a single TCL is described by a stochastic difference equation and the TCL status (ON, OFF) by a deterministic switching mechanism. The procedure is formal as it allows the exact quantification of the error introduced by the abstraction -- as such it builds and improves on a known, earlier approximation technique in the literature. Further, the contribution discusses the extension to the case of a heterogeneous population of TCL by means of two approaches resulting in the notion of approximate abstractions. It moreover investigates the problem of global (population-level) regulation and load balancing for the case of TCL that are dependent on a control input. The procedure is tested on a case study and benchmarked against the mentioned alternative approach in the literature.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1307.6716,
  title  = {Aggregation and Control of Populations of Thermostatically Controlled Loads by Formal Abstractions},
  author = {Sadegh Esmaeil Zadeh Soudjani and Alessandro Abate},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1307.6716},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

40 pages, 21 figures; the paper generalizes the result of conference publication: S. Esmaeil Zadeh Soudjani and A. Abate, "Aggregation of Thermostatically Controlled Loads by Formal Abstractions," Proceedings of the European Control Conference 2013, pp. 4232-4237. version 2: added references for section 1