A multi-agent control based demand response strategy for multi-zone buildings

This paper presents a multi-agent control approach for optimal demand management of multi-zone buildings. A near-optimal heuristic is proposed for a typical chilled-water air-conditioning (AC) system that can be used to formulate a demand response (DR) problem under a convex form. Then a building multi-agent control framework is utilized to synthesize a multi-agent controller where an alternating direction multiplier method (ADMM) based algorithm is adopted for intra-agent optimization and inter-agent coordination. With the proposed multi-agent DR strategy, 6% energy cost savings and 20% demand cost savings were achieved for a month period with a 3-zone case study.