Improving the Centralized Control of Thermostatically Controlled Appliances by Obtaining the Right Information

This letter presents a performance enhancement for a previously developed direct load control scheme that controls (toggles on/off) thermostatically controlled appliances (TCAs) through two-way communication infrastructure for providing load balancing services. In addition to device operating temperature and on/off status (TCA states), two more pieces of information, rates of temperature increase and decrease (RTI/RTD), are calculated at each TCA and communicated to the central controller. By communicating the RTI/RTD to the central controller, the same or even better control performance can be achieved at 2-3 times longer sampling periods, showing significant reduction of the communication needs from each TCA to the central controller.