Enlightening Customers on Merits of Demand-Side Load Control: A Simple-But-Efficient-Platform

Abstract

The impressive advantages offered by of demand-side participation have accelerated deployment of demand response (DR) programs. However, the first step to attain the benefits of DR programs is to increase awareness level of the customers. This paper proposes a simple-but-efficient platform to enlighten the costumers on manifested merits of demand-side load control. The proposed platform is a web-based application which acquires the load profile of the customer, associated flexible appliances, and the customer preferences for using the appliances. In turn, presents the optimal operation schedule for flexible appliances and attained benefits from using the optimal schedule. To calculate the optimal operation schedule, a mixed-integer linear optimization model is devised where the decision variables are settings of flexible appliances, charge/discharge status and amount of storage device, charge/discharge status, and amount of electrical vehicle. The devised optimization engine is linked to a database to acquire required data for optimization which encompasses historical data for customer load, forecasts of renewables, ratings of customers' flexible appliances, and subjected energy tariff. The attained optimal scheduling for the customer is then returned to the database. On the other hand, the database is linked to the webbased user interface to get the user preferences (write to the database) and represent the recommendation for optimal operation and attained benefits (read from database). To manage the links between web-based user interface, database, and optimization tool, proper linking application programming interfaces (APIs) are devised. The proposed platform is testified using real-world data and its effectiveness is assured by experimental studies.

Assessing the Feasibility of Game-Theory-Based Demand Response Management by Practical Implementation

“…To the best of our knowledge, scarce works took the practical viewpoint to provide guidelines for implementing DR approaches (especially those GT-based approaches) in practice. Recently, one latest paper [23] has made a breakthrough from a practical aspect by devising a web-based platform, over which an application programming interface (API) was developed to guide users how to acquire and process DR related data. However, the DR approach in [23] was also verified using simulation, which means the applicability of this platform is constrained as the cloud service.…”