Online Distributed Coordination Operation for Grid-Interactive Efficient Residential Buildings

Grid-interactive efficient buildings can provide many benefits for the power grid. However, it is very challenging to coordinate their operations intelligently due to many considerations, e.g., privacy protection and scalability. To this end, this paper investigates an optimal coordination operation problem of multiple grid-interactive residential buildings under uncertainties to minimize the total peak demand violation of all residential buildings during the grid service periods while minimizing their respective operation cost. Taking into account multi-source uncertainties, temporal and spatial couplings, inexplicit thermal dynamics models, and the lack of information sharing among residential buildings incurred by privacy protection, it is difficult to design a centralized model-based optimization operation method. To overcome the challenge, we design an online distributed coordination operation algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and relative entropy regularized policy iteration (RERPI). The designed algorithm consists of two stages, i.e., independent offline training of each RERPI-based agent related to the building energy management system controller (BEMSC) in each residential building (stage-1) and online distributed execution for coordination between the aggregator controller and each BEMSC under the ADMM framework (stage-2). Simulation results verify the effectiveness and scalability of the designed algorithm.