Decentralized Coordination of Large Populations of Flexible Electrical Appliances through Demand Saturation

This paper presents a novel decentralized control strategy for integration of price-responsive loads in the electricity market. Previous work has shown that, by approximating the devices population as a continuum, it is possible to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a Nash equilibrium (no device has unilateral interest in changing its scheduling when considering the resulting profile of aggregate demand). These results are now extended by introducing a time varying proportional constraint on the maximum power consumption of the appliances. This allows to saturate the flexible demand and obtain a Nash equilibrium for a much wider range of scenarios. The performance of the proposed control technique, which also minimizes the task time of all appliances, is tested in simulation.