Load Management in District Heating Operation

Smooth operation of district heating system will avoid installation of expensive peak heat boilers, improve plant partial load performance, increase the system redundancy for further network expansion and improve its resilience to ensure security of supply during severe heating seasons. The peak heating load can be reduced through building demand side management. The building thermal mass can be used to shift the heating supply under the circumstance without jeopardizing the consumer thermal comfort. In this paper, the multi-agent framework is applied to a simplified building dynamic model to regulate the heating supply to a cluster of buildings. The aim is to level out the total heating supply under a reference temperature and meanwhile maintain the consumer thermal comfort.