Multi-level dispatch control architecture for power systems with demand-side resources

Demand-side resources have considerable potential, which can provide efficient load shedding operations so as to maintain the supply-demand balance together with generating units. This study is concerned with active power dispatch and control problems by considering both generating units and demand-side resources, where some controllable loads in demand-side are aggregated under each bus load agent. A multi-level dispatch control architecture is proposed, which can handle the optimisation and control problems in different time scales. Specifically, an upper layer performs calculation of system´s look-ahead dispatch for generating units and bus load agents, while a middle level computes control actions for multiple load clusters in each bus load agent via a distributed consensus estimation algorithm, and multiple energy management units in the lower layer respond the control instruction issued from the load cluster based on a distributed pinning control algorithm. For the middle and lower layers, participants can communicate with its neighbours via sparse communication networks for the sake of distributed calculation or distributed control, which is more robust than the centralised strategies in terms of dealing with massive amounts of participation units. The simulation results on a modified IEEE 9 bus system show the applicability of the proposed architecture.