Scalable demand response of residential electric loads has been a timely research topic in recent years. The commercial coming of age or residential demand response requires a scalable control architecture that is both efficient and practical to use. This work presents such a strategy for domestic hot water heaters and present a commercial proof-of-concept deployment. The strategy combines state of the art in aggregate-and-dispatch with a novel dispatch strategy leveraging recent developments in reinforcement learning and is tested in a hardware-in-theloop simulation environment. The results are promising and present how model-based and model-free control strategies can be merged to obtain a mature and commercially viable control strategy for residential demand response.Index Terms-Thermostatically controlled load, model predictive control, demand response, reinforcement learning.
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