Transactive Control of Commercial Buildings for Demand Response

Transactive control is a type of distributed control strategy that uses market mechanisms to engage self-interested responsive loads to achieve power balance in the electrical power grid. In this paper, we propose a transactive control approach of commercial building heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems for demand response. We first describe the system models, and identify their model parameters using data collected from systems engineering building (SEB) located on our Pacific Northwest National Laboratory campus. We next present a transactive control market structure for commercial building HVAC systems, and describe its agent bidding and market clearing strategies. Several case studies are performed in a simulation environment using building controls virtual test bed (BCVTB) and calibrated SEB EnergyPlus model. We show that the proposed transactive control approach is very effective at peak shaving, load shifting, and strategic conservation for commercial building HVAC systems.