Distributed MPC applied to power demand side control

In the future, global energy balance of a smart grid system can be achieved by its agents deciding on their own power demand locally and the exchange of these decisions. In this paper, we model a network of households with washing machine programs that can be shifted in time so that the overall power demand is flattened. The network model describes how the information of power imbalance of individual agents can be exchanged in the system. Additionally, dynamics, washing machine constraints and power demand forecasts of each agent are included. Compared to existing smart grid models with hierarchical structures, our model, together with a market mechanism, achieves the power balance in the system in a completely distributed way. The market mechanism is a distributed MPC scheme based on dual decomposition and sub-gradient iterations. We provide results with a realistic power and washing machine demand pattern and we test scalability of the problem. Finally, we provide insights in the scalability of the algorithms.