Randomized automated demand response for real-time pricing

Automated demand response (ADR) is an essential technology for demand management such as real-time pricing. A major issue for ADR is the design of the units which control electric supply to each electric devise according to the price, so as to benefit both the supplier and consumer sides. Although a kind of universal design principle must be useful for the issue, it has never been established so far. This paper thus attempts to derive a design principle of the ADR units for real-time pricing and proposes ADR units based on it. First, as a design principle, it is clarified that the heterogeneity of the consumer-side actions is essential to control the total electric power consumption. Based on it, we propose randomized ADR units to artificially produce the heterogeneity. In each proposed unit, a random number is generated and electric power is provided to the connected electric devise only if a price-dependent condition is satisfied for the resulting random number. The proposed units enable the consumers to automatically buy electricity with a low price and allow the supplier to control the total consumption. They also guarantee the scalability of the resulting real-time pricing system.