Swarm intelligence-based distributed stochastic model predictive control for transactive operation of networked building clusters

To maximize potential energy and cost savings, networked clusters of local buildings are formed for energy transactions. Both centralized and distributed decision approaches were explored in past decades as a way to enable efficient transactive operations. However, online distributed stochastic transactive operation has been overlooked in the literature. To bridge gaps in the research, a bi-level distributed stochastic model predictive control framework was proposed to study the transactive operations of building clusters where a system-level agent is employed to coordinate multiple building agents at the subsystem level. The energy transaction is optimized by a marginal price-based particle swarm optimizer at the system level. Given the energy transaction decisions, each building can independently solve a scenario-based two-stage stochastic model to optimally dispatch the electricity and ancillary services for optimal energy performance. The effectiveness of the proposed framework and coordination algorithm are demonstrated in deterministic, stochastic, and online operations and compared to centralized decisions using several sets of experiments. In addition, the proposed approach can realize autonomous transactive operation and be extended to community-level building clusters in a plug-and-play way. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.