Grid Interactive Smart Buildings Coordination in Multi-Area Power Systems: A Delay-Robustness Analysis

This work focuses on the frequency support control problem for Grid-Interactive Smart Buildings (GISBs) with Thermostatically-Controlled Loads (TCLs). The problem is formalized by leveraging multi-agent systems paradigm and a distributed delayed PID-based controller is introduced in order to guarantee that each GISB provides a fast frequency support to the main grid while maintaining a desired comfort level. Compared to the technical literature, the main novelty relies in considering communication latencies from the beginning of control design phase, thus guaranteeing that the proposed control protocol is able to counteract the unavoidable presence of heterogeneous time-varying delays arising during information sharing among all the electrical entities. Extensive simulation results, exploiting also latin hypercube sampling technique, show the effectiveness and the resilience of the approach with respect to delays and parameters uncertainties, while also highlighting the delay stability margin of the entire network.