A Distributed Demand Response Control Strategy Using Lyapunov Optimization

Motivated by the potential ability of heating ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems in demand response (DR), we propose a distributed DR control strategy to dispatch the HVAC loads considering the current aggregated power supply (including the intermittent renewable power supply). The control objective is to reduce the variation of nonrenewable power demand without affecting the user-perceived quality of experience. To solve the problem, first, a queueing model is built for the thermal dynamics of the HVAC unit based on the equivalent thermal parameters (ETP) model. Second, optimization problems are formulated. Based on an extended Lyapunov optimization approach, a control algorithm is proposed to approximately solve the problems. Third, a DR control strategy with a low communication requirement is proposed to implement the control algorithm in a distributed way. Finally, practical data sets are used to evaluate and demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed control algorithm.