Can Buildings Swarm?

About the Presentation

Demand Response, the process of modifying customer behavior to improve grid performance, is becoming an increasingly popular and powerful tool for grid operators to avoid high peak demand and to improve the integration of renewable resources. However, with increased use of demand response comes increased risk from unintended synchronization of customer loads and increased vulnerability to cyber attack. In this talk, we explore decentralized control and aggregation of residential air conditioners using lessons learned from the study of biological swarms and multi-robot systems. We will show how these tools can lead to a new framework which can enhance the behavior of a large number of coordinated loads and can lead to an inherently more robust approach to demand-side management.