Analysis of Activation Constraints and their Effect on Demand-Side Flexibility Allocations

Demand-Side Management (DSM) programs in literature and industry alike often enforce constraints on the activation of flexible power provided by customers. While constraining consumption flexibility used in DSM can lower the entry barrier for flexibility providers, the specific constraints used can also have an impact on the efficacy of employing such flexibility. While different problems requiring their own form of consumption flexibility are described in literature, systematic analyses of the impact of activation constraints on such DSM programs are limited. This paper addresses this by analyzing the effects of different activation constraints for power flexibility used in industry, to different problem cases involving renewable production resources. This sensitivity study of activation constraints is performed using real world electricity production and imbalance data for different locations in Belgium. Our work shows that depending on the use case, some constraint dimensions influence the efficiency attained in best case flexibility scheduling while other constraint dimensions do not have any influence in certain other cases. These results are compared against constraint parameters used in flexibility products by system operators today and provide insights into possible improvements of constraint parameters in different use cases.