A Two-Layer Near-Optimal Strategy for Substation Constraint Management via Home Batteries
Igor Melatti, Federico Mari, Toni Mancini, Milan Prodanovic, Enrico Tronci. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, 69(8), pages 8566-8578, 2022.
Igor Melatti, Federico Mari, Toni Mancini, Milan Prodanovic, Enrico Tronci.
A Two-Layer Near-Optimal Strategy for Substation Constraint Management via Home Batteries.
IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, 69(8), pages 8566-8578, 2022.
DOI: 10.1109/TIE.2021.3102431BibTex entry
@ARTICLE{melatti-etal:2021:tie, TITLE = {A Two-Layer Near-Optimal Strategy for Substation Constraint Management via Home Batteries}, AUTHOR = {Melatti, I. and Mari, F. and Mancini, T. and Prodanovic, M. and Tronci, E.}, DOI = {10.1109/TIE.2021.3102431}, ISSN = {0278-0046}, JOURNAL = {{IEEE} Transactions on Industrial Electronics}, NUMBER = {8}, PAGES = {8566--8578}, PUBLISHER = {IEEE}, VOLUME = {69}, YEAR = {2022} }
Within electrical distribution networks, substation constraints management requires that aggregated power demand from residential users is kept within suitable bounds. Efficiency of substation constraints management can be measured as the reduction of constraints violations w.r.t. unmanaged demand.
Home batteries hold the promise of enabling efficient and user-oblivious substation constraints management. Centralised control of home batteries would achieve optimal efficiency. However, it is hardly acceptable by users, since service providers (e.g., utilities or aggregators) would directly control batteries at user premises.
Unfortunately, devising efficient hierarchical control strategies, thus overcoming the above problem, is far from easy. We presented a novel two-layer control strategy for home batteries that avoids direct control of home devices by the service provider and at the same time yields near-optimal substation constraints management efficiency.

Results
- We proposed DANCA (Demand-Aware Network Constraint mAnager) enclosing two services:
- ADAPT (DemAnD–Aware Power limiT), executed independently for each EDN substation s, whose goal is to maintain the aggregated power demand of s within the desired range given in input, by computing individualised and time-dependent lower and upper bounds on the power demand of each house connected to s. The duration of such bounds must be long enough to allow users to actually shift their power demand (one day in our experiments).
- LAHEMS (Lightweight Adaptive Home Energy Management System), run independently on each residential user u, whose goal is to maintain the demand of u within the power bounds decided for u by ADAPT. LAHEMS acts as a Home Energy Management System (HEMS) which is able to control the charge and discharge of home batteries, thus shifting the demand of u to stay inside the given power bounds. To this aim, LAHEMS must compute actions on home batteries with a sufficiently short periodicity (5 minutes in our experiments), to catch up with variations in the demand of u.
- Simulation results on field data from 62 households in Denmark show that the substation constraints management efficiency achieved with our approach is at least 82% of the one obtained with a theoretical optimal centralised strategy.