A distributed cooperative power allocation method for campus buildings

We propose a coordination algorithm for cooperative power allocation among a collection of commercial buildings within a campus. We describe a typical commercial building Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system, and utilize Model Predictive Control (MPC) to characterize its power flexibility. The power allocation problem is formulated as a cooperative game using the Nash Bargaining Solution (NBS) concept, in which buildings cooperatively maximize the product of their utilities subject to their local flexibility constraints and a total power limit set by the campus coordinator. To solve the optimal allocation problem, a distributed protocol is designed using dual decomposition of the Nash bargaining problem. Numerical simulations are performed to demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed allocation method.