Title: A Study of Virtual Energy Storage From Thermostatically Controlled Loads Under Time-Varying Weather Conditions
We propose a control architecture for distributed coordination of a collection of on/off TCLs (thermostatically con-
trolled loads), such as residential air conditioners, to provide the same service to the power grid as a large battery.
A key constraint is to ensure that consumers’ quality of service (QoS) is maintained. Our proposal involves replac-
ing the thermostats at the loads by a randomized controller, following recent proposals in this direction. The new
local controller has a tunable parameter that serves as the control command from the balancing authority (BA). Com-
pared to prior work in this area, our proposed architecture can handle large disturbances from the outside temperature.
Weather-induced disturbance also imposes an algorithm-independent limit on the capacity of the virtual energy storage
the loads can provide. This key limitation, which was ignored in prior work, is incorporated in our formulation in a
principled manner. more »« less
Raman, Naren Srivaths; Gaikwad, Ninad; Barooah, Prabir; Meyn, Sean P.(
, American Control Conference)
null
(Ed.)
With increase in the frequency of natural disasters such as hurricanes that disrupt the supply from the grid, there is a greater need for resiliency in electric supply. Rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) panels along with batteries can provide resiliency to a house in a blackout due to a natural disaster. Our previous work showed that intelligence can reduce the size of a PV+battery system for the same level of post-blackout service compared to a conventional system that does not employ intelligent control. The intelligent controller proposed is based on model predictive control (MPC), which has two main challenges. One, it requires simple yet accurate models as it involves real-time optimization. Two, the discrete actuation for residential loads (on/off) makes the underlying optimization problem a mixed-integer program (MIP) which is challenging to solve. An attractive alternative to MPC is reinforcement learning (RL) as the real-time control computation is both model-free and simple. These points of interest accompany certain trade-offs; RL requires computationally expensive offline learning, and its performance is sensitive to various design choices. In this work, we propose an RL-based controller. We compare its performance with the MPC controller proposed in our prior work and a non-intelligent baseline controller. The RL controller is found to provide a resiliency performance — by commanding critical loads and batteries—similar to MPC with a significant reduction in computational effort.
Zeng, Tingting; Barooah, Prabir(
, ASME Journal of Engineering for Sustainable Buildings and Cities)
null
(Ed.)
Abstract An autonomous adaptive model predictive control (MPC) architecture is presented for control of heating, ventilation, and air condition (HVAC) systems to maintain indoor temperature while reducing energy use. Although equipment use and occupant changes with time, existing MPC methods are not capable of automatically relearning models and computing control decisions reliably for extended periods without intervention from a human expert. We seek to address this weakness. Two major features are embedded in the proposed architecture to enable autonomy: (i) a system identification algorithm from our prior work that periodically re-learns building dynamics and unmeasured internal heat loads from data without requiring re-tuning by experts. The estimated model is guaranteed to be stable and has desirable physical properties irrespective of the data; (ii) an MPC planner with a convex approximation of the original nonconvex problem. The planner uses a descent and convergent method, with the underlying optimization problem being feasible and convex. A yearlong simulation with a realistic plant shows that both of the features of the proposed architecture—periodic model and disturbance update and convexification of the planning problem—are essential to get performance improvement over a commonly used baseline controller. Without these features, long-term energy savings from MPC can be small while with them, the savings from MPC become substantial.
Campbell, C.; Mecca, N.; Duong, T.; Obeid, I.; Picone, J.(
, IEEE Signal Processing in Medicine and Biology Symposium (SPMB))
Obeid, Iyad; Selesnick, Ivan; Picone, Joseph
(Ed.)
The goal of this work was to design a low-cost computing facility that can support the development of an
open source digital pathology corpus containing 1M images [1]. A single image from a clinical-grade digital
pathology scanner can range in size from hundreds of megabytes to five gigabytes. A 1M image database
requires over a petabyte (PB) of disk space. To do meaningful work in this problem space requires a
significant allocation of computing resources. The improvements and expansions to our HPC (highperformance
computing) cluster, known as Neuronix [2], required to support working with digital
pathology fall into two broad categories: computation and storage. To handle the increased computational
burden and increase job throughput, we are using Slurm [3] as our scheduler and resource manager. For
storage, we have designed and implemented a multi-layer filesystem architecture to distribute a filesystem
across multiple machines. These enhancements, which are entirely based on open source software, have
extended the capabilities of our cluster and increased its cost-effectiveness.
Slurm has numerous features that allow it to generalize to a number of different scenarios. Among the most
notable is its support for GPU (graphics processing unit) scheduling. GPUs can offer a tremendous
performance increase in machine learning applications [4] and Slurm’s built-in mechanisms for handling
them was a key factor in making this choice. Slurm has a general resource (GRES) mechanism that can be
used to configure and enable support for resources beyond the ones provided by the traditional HPC
scheduler (e.g. memory, wall-clock time), and GPUs are among the GRES types that can be supported by
Slurm [5]. In addition to being able to track resources, Slurm does strict enforcement of resource allocation.
This becomes very important as the computational demands of the jobs increase, so that they have all the
resources they need, and that they don’t take resources from other jobs. It is a common practice among
GPU-enabled frameworks to query the CUDA runtime library/drivers and iterate over the list of GPUs,
attempting to establish a context on all of them. Slurm is able to affect the hardware discovery process of
these jobs, which enables a number of these jobs to run alongside each other, even if the GPUs are in
exclusive-process mode.
To store large quantities of digital pathology slides, we developed a robust, extensible distributed storage
solution. We utilized a number of open source tools to create a single filesystem, which can be mounted
by any machine on the network. At the lowest layer of abstraction are the hard drives, which were split into
4 60-disk chassis, using 8TB drives. To support these disks, we have two server units, each equipped with
Intel Xeon CPUs and 128GB of RAM. At the filesystem level, we have implemented a multi-layer solution
that: (1) connects the disks together into a single filesystem/mountpoint using the ZFS (Zettabyte File
System) [6], and (2) connects filesystems on multiple machines together to form a single mountpoint using
Gluster [7].
ZFS, initially developed by Sun Microsystems, provides disk-level awareness and a filesystem which takes
advantage of that awareness to provide fault tolerance. At the filesystem level, ZFS protects against data
corruption and the infamous RAID write-hole bug by implementing a journaling scheme (the ZFS intent
log, or ZIL) and copy-on-write functionality. Each machine (1 controller + 2 disk chassis) has its own separate ZFS filesystem. Gluster, essentially a meta-filesystem, takes each of these, and provides the means
to connect them together over the network and using distributed (similar to RAID 0 but without striping
individual files), and mirrored (similar to RAID 1) configurations [8].
By implementing these improvements, it has been possible to expand the storage and computational power
of the Neuronix cluster arbitrarily to support the most computationally-intensive endeavors by scaling
horizontally. We have greatly improved the scalability of the cluster while maintaining its excellent
price/performance ratio [1].
Cammardella, Neil; Bušić, Ana; Meyn, Sean P.(
, SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization)
Editor-in-Chief: George Yin
(Ed.)
This paper presents approaches to mean-field control, motivated by distributed control of multi-agent systems. Control solutions are based on a convex optimization problem, whose domain is a convex set of probability mass functions (pmfs). The main contributions follow:
1. Kullback-Leibler-Quadratic (KLQ) optimal control is a special case,
in which the objective function is composed of a control cost in the form of Kullback-Leibler divergence between a candidate pmf and the nominal, plus a quadratic cost on the sequence of marginals. Theory in this paper extends prior work on deterministic control systems, establishing that the optimal solution is an exponential tilting of the nominal pmf. Transform techniques are introduced to reduce complexity of the KLQ solution, motivated by the need to consider time horizons that are much longer than the inter-sampling times required for reliable control.
2. Infinite-horizon KLQ leads to a state feedback control solution with attractive properties.
It can be expressed as either state feedback, in which the state is the sequence of marginal pmfs, or an open loop solution is obtained that is more easily computed.
3. Numerical experiments are surveyed in an application of distributed control of residential loads to provide grid services, similar to utility-scale battery storage.
The results show that KLQ optimal control enables the aggregate power consumption of a collection of flexible loads to track a time-varying reference signal, while simultaneously ensuring each individual load satisfies its own quality of service constraints.
Power grids are evolving at an unprecedented pace due to the rapid growth of distributed energy resources (DER) in communities. These resources are very different from traditional power sources as they are located closer to loads and thus can significantly reduce transmission losses and carbon emissions. However, their intermittent and variable nature often results in spikes in the overall demand on distribution system operators (DSO). To manage these challenges, there has been a surge of interest in building decentralized control schemes, where a pool of DERs combined with energy storage devices can exchange energy locally to smooth fluctuations in net demand. Building a decentralized market for transactive microgrids is challenging because even though a decentralized system provides resilience, it also must satisfy requirements like privacy, efficiency, safety, and security, which are often in conflict with each other. As such, existing implementations of decentralized markets often focus on resilience and safety but compromise on privacy. In this paper, we describe our platform, called TRANSAX, which enables participants to trade in an energy futures market, which improves efficiency by finding feasible matches for energy trades, enabling DSOs to plan their energy needs better. TRANSAX provides privacy to participants by anonymizing their trading activity using a distributed mixing service, while also enforcing constraints that limit trading activity based on safety requirements, such as keeping planned energy flow below line capacity. We show that TRANSAX can satisfy the seemingly conflicting requirements of efficiency, safety, and privacy. We also provide an analysis of how much trading efficiency is lost. Trading efficiency is improved through the problem formulation which accounts for temporal flexibility, and system efficiency is improved using a hybrid-solver architecture. Finally, we describe a testbed to run experiments and demonstrate its performance using simulation results.
Coffman, Austin, Busic, Ana, and Barooah, Prabir. A Study of Virtual Energy Storage From Thermostatically Controlled Loads Under Time-Varying Weather Conditions. Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10076821. 5th International High Performance Buildings Conference 5.
Coffman, Austin, Busic, Ana, & Barooah, Prabir. A Study of Virtual Energy Storage From Thermostatically Controlled Loads Under Time-Varying Weather Conditions. 5th International High Performance Buildings Conference, 5 (). Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10076821.
Coffman, Austin, Busic, Ana, and Barooah, Prabir.
"A Study of Virtual Energy Storage From Thermostatically Controlled Loads Under Time-Varying Weather Conditions". 5th International High Performance Buildings Conference 5 (). Country unknown/Code not available. https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10076821.
@article{osti_10076821,
place = {Country unknown/Code not available},
title = {A Study of Virtual Energy Storage From Thermostatically Controlled Loads Under Time-Varying Weather Conditions},
url = {https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10076821},
abstractNote = {We propose a control architecture for distributed coordination of a collection of on/off TCLs (thermostatically con- trolled loads), such as residential air conditioners, to provide the same service to the power grid as a large battery. A key constraint is to ensure that consumers’ quality of service (QoS) is maintained. Our proposal involves replac- ing the thermostats at the loads by a randomized controller, following recent proposals in this direction. The new local controller has a tunable parameter that serves as the control command from the balancing authority (BA). Com- pared to prior work in this area, our proposed architecture can handle large disturbances from the outside temperature. Weather-induced disturbance also imposes an algorithm-independent limit on the capacity of the virtual energy storage the loads can provide. This key limitation, which was ignored in prior work, is incorporated in our formulation in a principled manner.},
journal = {5th International High Performance Buildings Conference},
volume = {5},
author = {Coffman, Austin and Busic, Ana and Barooah, Prabir},
}
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