A Consumer-Comfort Preserved Aggregative Approach for Realizing HVAC Flexibility Using Explicit MPC

With the ever-increasing penetration of renewable resources, realizing the flexibility of HVAC systems is valuable for maintaining power balance throughout Sustainable Electric Energy Systems (SEESs). The temperature set-point of the buildings has been adjusted to accommodate the thermal needs of the residents, thereby enabling system flexibility. Aggregators have become essential intermediaries for organizing distributed, manageable loads. Within this context, this paper proposes a new aggregation mechanism to realize the flexibility of Heating-Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) systems in SEES. For the sake of HVAC control, we employ Model Predictive Control (MPC) technique. Since conventional MPC imposes the online computational burden, we adopt an Explicit MPC (EMPC) strategy to provide fast response. The proposed methodology was implemented in two case studies involving three buildings and 50 buildings to examine scalability. In these case studies, the methodology successfully maximized the flexibility of air conditioning demand, achieving a 76.26% for three buildings and 75.25% for 50 buildings reduction in the maximum power requested by the SEES operator, without compromising the thermal comfort of the occupants in the case of three buildings.