An efficient algorithm for the provision of a day-ahead modulation service by a load aggregator

This article studies a decision making problem faced by an aggregator willing to offer a load modulation service to a Transmission System Operator. This service is contracted one day ahead and consists in a load modulation option, which can be called once per day. The option specifies the range of a potential modification on the demand of the loads within a certain time interval. The specific case where the loads can be modeled by a generic tank model is considered. Under this assumption, the problem of maximizing the range of the load modulation service can be formulated as a mixed integer linear programming problem. A novel heuristic-method is proposed to solve this problem in a computationally efficient manner. This method is tested on a set of problems. The results show that this approach can be orders of magnitude faster than CPLEX without significantly degrading the solution accuracy.