Model predictive control for integration of industrial consumers to the smart grid under a direct control policy

In this paper, we study a three-level hierarchical control framework for integration of industrial consumers to the future smart grid. With this structure, a balance responsible party (BRP) at the top level will be able to provide regulating power from the consumer side to help the power grid in case there is imbalance between demand and supply. We consider heterogeneous consumers at the bottom level, namely a cold storage in supermarkets and a chiller equipped with ice storage. These consumers are under the direct control of a mid-level controller, a so-called aggregator. The aggregator receives a certain amount of power reference within a certain activation time from BRP and applies a model predictive controller (MPC) approach to split up the power reference between different consumers in an optimal way. Each consumer has its own characteristics and constraints that should be honored by the aggregator.