IOT-oriented control of aggregate thermostatically-controlled loads

Today, the leading companies in the energy management industry offer reward plans to motivate their customers to participate in demand response (DR) programs. One of the existing DR plans pursued by companies such as Honeywell and Nest is to adjust the household air conditioning system settings through Internet-connected smart thermostats in response to power grid requirements. Due to the existence of the Internet-based communications infrastructure and the growing popularity of smart thermostats, this strategy creates a low-cost well-rounded solution to establish a systematic demand-side energy management practice in a near future. Motivated by such opportunities, this paper introduces a novel feedback control algorithm, so-called Clock-Like-Controller (CLC), to adjust the individual setpoints of the TCL units to achieve a desirable aggregate response. This research contributes to the literature through two novel insights. First, unlike most of the previous TCL control methods which adjust the setpoint temperatures continuously, the proposed control scheme adjusts the thermostat setpoints in discrete intervals, e.g., 1 °C, to facilitate implementation through the currently available infrastructure. Second, the developed control algorithm accesses the individual loads in a systematic way with no randomness involved. This approach maximizes equal participation of all customers in the DR practice. Since the devised control strategy focuses on the Internet-connected thermostats, we refer to it as an IoT-oriented method. Numerical simulations are carried out and presented to validate and demonstrate the performance of the proposed CLC algorithm.