Communication-Efficient Distributed Demand Response: A Randomized ADMM Approach

In this paper, we consider the distributed demand response (DDR) problem for achieving the real-time power balance in a neighborhood with a large number of load customers and renewable energy sources (RES). While most of the existing DDR schemes require iterative information exchange between the customers and the load aggregator through two-way communications, this paper studies the DDR schemes that rely on neighbor-wise communication between customers only. Such DDR schemes can be realized by low-cost wireless networks. To this end, we propose the use of a randomized alternating direction method of multipliers to develop a fully DDR algorithm. Notably, the proposed DDR algorithm is communication-efficient because it can yield promising power balance performance using a few times of neighbor-wise message exchanges. Moreover, the proposed DDR algorithm does not need synchronization between customers and is robust against random communication errors. For performing online demand response control, we combine the proposed DDR algorithm with the rolling-window-based model-predictive control method, and simple load and RES forecasting methods. By using real solar power data, we demonstrate via simulations that the proposed DDR algorithm improves the real-time power balance substantially and outperforms the existing DDR schemes that use the subgradient method for optimization.