Laboratoire d'Automatique Demand Response Platform

What is LADR ?

The Laboratoire d'Automatique Demand Response platform (LADR) is a project led by a team of scientists at the Laboratoire d'automatique at the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne. It consists of a set of experimental demonstrators used to test building control methods and algorithms developed in the laboratory.

The LADR platform is comprised of two main testbed both on the EPFL campus in Lausanne. The first one is represented by a fully-occupied section of the laboratoire d'automatique. This section has been completely retrofitted with a network of remote sensors and a custom heating systems in order to perform heating control experiments. The second one, is a one-zone conference building served by a standard heat pump.

The platform has been used to perform Demand Response experiments. Among other things, it has been used to: 1) emulate the participation of the building in the Swiss ancillary services market, providing secondary frequency control; 2) demonstrate the impact of a controllable load in mitigating renewable energy uncertainty.