Robust MPC with data-driven demand forecasting for frequency regulation with heat pumps

作者：Felix Bünning, Joseph Warrington, Philipp Heer, Roy S. Smith, John Lygeros · 发表于：Control Engineering Practice · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.1016/j.conengprac.2022.105101 · 被引用次数：46 · 研究领域：Building Energy and Comfort Optimization、Smart Grid Energy Management、Advanced Control Systems Optimization

With the increased amount of volatile renewable energy sources connected to the electricity grid, and the phase-out of fossil fuel based power plants, there is an increased need for frequency regulation. On the demand side, frequency regulation services can be offered by buildings or districts that are equipped with electric heating or cooling systems, by exploiting their thermal inertia. Existing approaches for tapping into this potential typically rely on dynamic building models, which in practice can be challenging to obtain and maintain. As a result, practical implementations of such systems are scarce. Moreover, actively controlling buildings requires extensive control infrastructure and may cause privacy concerns in district energy systems. Motivated by this, we exploit the thermal inertia of buffer storage for reserves, reducing the building models to demand forecasts here. By combining a control scheme based on Robust Model Predictive Control, with affine policies, and heating demand forecasting based on Artificial Neural Networks with online correction methods, we offer frequency regulation reserves and maintain user comfort with a system comprising a heat pump and buffer storage. While the robust approach ensures occupant comfort, the use of affine policies reduces the effect of disturbance uncertainty on the system state. In a first-of-its-kind experiment with a real district-like building energy system, we demonstrate that the scheme is able to offer reserves in a...