Distributed Control of Flexible Loads by Mean-Field Inversion

In this article, an original technique is proposed to control the aggregated electrical consumption of a population of flexible devices in order to follow a target consumption profile. The approach relies on an inversion technique, which takes advantage of the large number of devices to be controlled by mean-field approximations. Theoretical results justify the relevance of the proposed mean-field inversion technique. Finally, numerical simulations involving a population of water heaters show a good tradeoff between performance and amount of control input compared to a proportional–integral controller.