There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Use of model predictive control and weather forecasts for energy efficient building climate control

A communication infrastructure is an essential part to the success of the emerging smart grid. A scalable and pervasive communication infrastructure is crucial in both construction and operation of a smart grid. In this paper, we present the background and motivation of communication infrastructures in smart grid systems. We also summarize major requirements that smart grid communications must meet. From the experience of several industrial trials on smart grid with communication infrastructures, we expect that the traditional carbon fuel based power plants can cooperate with emerging distributed renewable energy such as wind, solar, etc, to reduce the carbon fuel consumption and consequent green house gas such as carbon dioxide emission. The consumers can minimize their expense on energy by adjusting their intelligent home appliance operations to avoid the peak hours and utilize the renewable energy instead. We further explore the challenges for a communication infrastructure as the part of a complex smart grid system. Since a smart grid system might have over millions of consumers and devices, the demand of its reliability and security is extremely critical. Through a communication infrastructure, a smart grid can improve power reliability and quality to eliminate electricity blackout. Security is a challenging issue since the on-going smart grid systems facing increasing vulnerabilities as more and more automation, remote monitoring/controlling and supervision entities are interconnected.

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1315&context=electricalengineeringfacpub

A Survey on Smart Grid CommunicationInfrastructures: Motivations, Requirements andChallenges

Theory and applications of HVAC control systems – A review of model predictive control (MPC)

The significant benefits associated with microgrids have led to vast efforts to expand their penetration in electric power systems. Although their deployment is rapidly growing, there are still many challenges to efficiently design, control, and operate microgrids when connected to the grid, and also when in islanded mode, where extensive research activities are underway to tackle these issues. It is necessary to have an across-the-board view of the microgrid integration in power systems. This paper presents a review of issues concerning microgrids and provides an account of research in areas related to microgrids, including distributed generation, microgrid value propositions, applications of power electronics, economic issues, microgrid operation and control, microgrid clusters, and protection and communications issues.

State of the Art in Research on Microgrids: A Review

In this study we present a Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach to Energy Management Systems (EMSs) for multiple residential microgrids. The EMS is responsible for optimally scheduling end-user smart appliances, heating systems and local generation devices at the residential level, based on end-user preferences, weather-dependent generation and demand forecasts, electric pricing, technical and operative constraints. The core of the proposed framework is a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model aiming at minimizing the overall costs of each residential microgrid. At each time step, the computed optimal decision is adjusted according to the actual values of weather-dependent local generation and heating requirements; then, corrective actions and their corresponding costs are accounted for in order to cope with imbalances. At the next time step, the optimization problem is re-computed based on updated forecasts and initial conditions. The proposed method is evaluated in a virtual testing environment that integrates accurate simulators of the energy systems forming the residential microgrids, including electric and thermal generation units, energy storage devices and flexible loads. The testing environment also emulates real-word network medium conditions on standard network interfaces. Numerical results show the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

An MPC-based Energy Management System for multiple residential microgrids

Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems play a fundamental role in maintaining acceptable thermal comfort and Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) levels, essentials for occupants well-being. Since performing this task implies high energy requirements, there is a need for improving the energetic efficiency of existing buildings. A possible solution is to develop effective control strategies for HVAC systems, but this is complicated by the inherent uncertainty of the to-be-controlled system. To cope with this problem, we design a stochastic Model Predictive Control (MPC) strategy that dynamically learns the statistics of the building occupancy and weather conditions and uses them to build probabilistic constraints on the indoor temperature and CO2 concentration levels. More specifically, we propose a randomization technique that finds suboptimal solutions to the generally non-convex stochastic MPC problem. The main advantage of this method is the absence of apriori assumptions on the distributions of the uncertain variables, and that it can be applied to any type of building. We investigate the proposed approach by means of numerical simulations and real tests on a student laboratory, and show its practical effectiveness and computational tractability.

/pdf/randomized-model-predictive-control-for-hvac-systems-1pt7p1la76.pdf

Randomized Model Predictive Control for HVAC Systems

Estimating the impacts of demand response by simulating household behaviours under price and CO2 signals

Generalised Control-Oriented Modelling Framework for Multi-Energy Systems

In this paper a robust optimization problem of an energy hub operations is presented. An energy hub is a multi-generation system where multiple energy carriers input to the hub are converted, stored and distributed in order to satisfy energy demands. The solution to energy hub operation problem determines the energy carriers to be purchased and stored in order to satisfy the energy requests while minimizing a cost function. A control approach using Robust Optimization (RO) techniques is proposed; bounded uncertainties on energy hub parameters are taken into account and RO methods are exploited to gain robust solutions which are feasible for all values, or for a selected subset, of uncertain data. Simulation results underline the benefits resulting from the application of the proposed approach to an energy hub structure located in Waterloo, Canada.

/pdf/robust-optimization-of-operations-in-energy-hub-59uijj7nzi.pdf

Alessandra Parisio

Papers

An MPC-based Energy Management System for multiple residential microgrids

Randomized Model Predictive Control for HVAC Systems

Estimating the impacts of demand response by simulating household behaviours under price and CO2 signals

Generalised Control-Oriented Modelling Framework for Multi-Energy Systems

Robust Optimization of operations in energy hub