Demand Dispatch with Heterogeneous Intelligent Loads

A distributed control architecture is presented that is intended to make a collection of heterogeneous loads appear to the grid operator as a nearly perfect battery. Local control is based on randomized decision rules advocated in prior research, and extended in this paper to any load with a discrete number of power states. Additional linear filtering at the load ensures that the input-output dynamics of the aggregate has a nearly flat input-output response: the behavior of an ideal, multi-GW battery system. Acknowledgements Research supported by NSF grant CPS-1259040, and PGMO (Gaspard Monge Program for Optimization and operations research). We thank Rim Kaddah of Telecom Paristech for many stimulating conversations, especially relating to the design choices discussed in Sections 2.2 and 2.3