Abstract-A major challenge to implementing residential demand response is that of aligning the objectives of many households, each of which aims to minimize its payments and maximize its comfort level, while balancing this with the objectives of an aggregator that aims to minimize the cost of electricity purchased in a pooled wholesale market. This paper presents a fast distributed algorithm for aggregating a large number of households with a mixture of discrete and continuous energy levels. A distinctive feature of the method in this paper is that the nonconvex DR problem is decomposed in terms of households as opposed to devices, which allows incorporating more intricate couplings between energy storage devices, appliances and distributed energy resources. The proposed method is a fast distributed algorithm applied to the double smoothed dual function of the adopted DR model. The method is tested on systems with up to 2560 households, each with 10 devices on average. The proposed algorithm is designed to terminate in 60 iterations irrespective of system size, which can be ideal for an online version of this problem. Moreover, numerical results show that with minimal parameter tuning, the algorithm exhibits a very similar convergence behavior throughout the studied systems and converges to near-optimal solutions, which corroborates its scalability.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.