Default detection in demand response based on block-sparse structure

Demand response (DR) is the change in electric consumption by prompting consumers to change their normal consumption patterns in response to financial incentives. In various forms of DR, the contract-based DR is a framework to achieve a certain reduction by the contract with individual participants for their reduction. However, in practice, it is inevitable to encounter a default, implying that some of the participants fail contracted reduction owing to an unexpected event. This study develops a method to detect defaulting participants in contract-based DR. The method iterates two steps: estimating the most suspicious participant and inspecting its smart meter. By utilizing block-sparse structures in the detection problem, it can exactly determine the defaulting participants with a small number of inspections. The performance is evaluated by simulation, which indicates that our method has much higher performance than the conventional method in the sense that the number of inspections approximately 96.8% fewer than that of the conventional one. • An algorithm is developed to detect defaulting participants in demand response. • Four special properties of contract-based demand response are extracted. • Four properties are captured as block sparsity of defaults and utilized in detection. • Our method improves detection performance by 96.8% over the conventional method.