Review of techniques to enable community-scale demand response strategy design

Incorporating demand side flexibility can aid in integrating intermittent renewable energy generation and reducing the electricity grid’s operational costs. Buildings have the potential to provide demand response (DR) with minimal disruption to activities by leveraging the inherent energy storage in their heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. Harnessing this flexibility whilst minimising energy consumption and maintaining thermal comfort requires control strategies capable of incorporating these objectives, making model-predictive control (MPC) a promising framework. To elucidate the control techniques available to harness the HVAC flexibility of collections of buildings to participate in electricity markets, this paper reviews the current state of literature describing MPC techniques for community-scale control. The reviewed studies were classified based the following characteristics: the general aim of the MPC approach, objective function, thermal response model, amount and type of buildings considered, DR type, control structure, solving tools and techniques, and the energy, cost savings or flexibility achieved. The review shows that MPC strategies can successfully provide many types of DR indicating the versatility of the control approach. Decentralised control approaches reduced the complexity of the large-scale control problem whilst providing more autonomy to individual users. However, compared to centralised approaches, decentralised control led to lower amounts of flexibility. Lastly, few studies validated the performance of their controller in either simulation or physical environments. Therefore, the review suggests further research is needed to study and validate the performance the of different MPC control structures considering various community types and concurrent participation in various DR schemes.