Collaborative Research: CPS: Medium: Adaptive, Human-centric Demand-side Flexibility Coordination At-scale in Electric Power Networks

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Active user participation in large-scale infrastructure systems, while presenting unprecedented opportunities, also poses significant challenges for the operator. One such example is electric power distribution systems, where the massive integration of distributed energy resources (DERs) and flexible loads motivates new decision-making paradigms via demand response through user engagement. This project introduces a novel approach for intelligent decision making in power distribution systems to efficiently leverage flexible demand commitments in highly uncertain and stochastic environments. The project goals are to (1) develop analytics required to enable actionable demand-side flexibility from several small consumers by adequately representing their constraints regarding electricity usage and their interactions with the system and the energy provider; and (2) develop a prototype for demand-side coordination using an open-source testbed for distribution systems management and evaluate the proposed algorithms with real-world utility data. Successful completion of this project will provide solutions to adaptive and smart infrastructure systems in which passive users turn into active participants. For the demand response focus here, this project will enable high levels of penetration of flexible loads and DERs economically through the transformation of grid operation from load following to supply following. The results from this project will provide valuable guidance to policymakers and electric utilities in managing aggregator-driven markets. The central aim of this proposal is to enable the demand-side participation of many small customers in a distribution grid and solve for an interface between customers and an energy provider. The proposed architecture follows a two-level structure: a home energy management system (HEMS) providing a home-level interaction between the consumer and the HEMS, and a feeder-level interaction between the HEMS and the demand-response provider. Research along two thrusts will be proposed: (1) learning-based control to achieve home-level flexibility upon learning and incorporating customer constraints and preferences into the decision-making process; and (2) game-theoretic constructs to aggregate and coordinate the home-level flexibility at the network-level in a constrained environment with unknown customer utility functions. Technical innovations at the HEMS-customer interface will include automata learning-based algorithms used by HEMS to learn customers’ temporally evolving energy usage constraints, and reinforcement learning algorithms to satisfy temporal constraints while optimizing the cost of electricity consumption. At the provider-HEMS interface, technical innovations will include a new mean field based model of customers that allows the provider to interact with only a few customer classes, and a Stackelberg game formulation that explicitly incorporates network congestion constraints.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.