A Recommender System for Predictive Control of Heating Systems in Economic Demand Response Programs

Abstract

Flexibility from demand-side resources is increasingly required in modern power systems to maintain the dynamic balance between demand and supply. This flexibility comes from elastic users managing controllable loads. In this context, controlling Electric Space Heaters (ESHs) is of particular interest because it can leverage building inner thermal storage capacity to shift consumption while maintaining comfort conditions. Some economic Demand Response (DR) programs have considered exploiting EHSs flexibility potentials in recent years. However, these programs still struggle to engage customers due to the complexity of processing price signals for inexpert users. Therefore, it is necessary to develop automated tools for helping users to operate their loads. Accordingly, this paper presents a recommender system based on Gaussian processes to discover users’ valuations of thermal comfort and perform the predictive control of their ESHs. The proposed method enables customers to participate in DR programs and impose their preferences through straightforward queries instead of directly changing control parameters. Validation results demonstrate that users maximize their utility by supplying noiseless and consistent data to the recommender system. Additionally, the suggested approach achieves a higher acceptance rate than other methods from the literature, such as persistency and support vector machines.

Keywords

• Heating systems
• predictive control
• preference learning
• recommender system
• utility maximization