Privacy-Based Coordination of Commercial Buildings in Distribution Systems

Commercial buildings spend vast amount of money every year on their electricity bill. Though optimal scheduling and control of commercial buildings had been widely discussed in the literature, coordination of multiple buildings still need further consideration. Privacy issue is a major consideration to building managers which makes the coordination problem very challenging. This paper proposes the use of the alternating direction method of multiplier (ADMM) to enable privacy-based coordination of commercial buildings. The formulated problem minimizes the electricity costs of different buildings as well as minimizing the power losses in the hosting network. The algorithm uses minimal amount of exchanged data to avoid any privacy invasion. A case study of multiple buildings, with HVAC systems and energy storage, is done on an IEEE 15-bus distribution system to verify the proposed problem formulation. The results showed that the algorithm can achieve comparable performance to the centralized case in terms of minimizing the costs and power losses.