Human-in-the-Loop Distributed Control of Grid-Interactive Buildings for Demand Response Participation

Kasra Mazarei Saadabadi, Dongming Wang, Wei Ren, Alfredo Martinez-Morales, Hamidreza Nazaripouya

This paper proposes a human-in-the-loop distributed consensus control approach for demand-side management across multiple buildings. Specifically, a novel framework is introduced in which a human acts as the non-autonomous leader in consensus control of cooperative buildings participating in demand response programs. In this system, the facility manager in the facility building serves as the leader, determining the participation level of cooperative buildings in demand response events while simultaneously considering occupants' comfort. Cooperative buildings align their responses with the facility management building, despite lacking direct access to the facility manager's decisions, which presents a challenge for observer design. To address this, a nonlinear unknown input sliding-mode observer is proposed, tailored for leader-follower multi-agent systems (MASs). Furthermore, a human-in-the-loop leader-follower consensus protocol is introduced, enabling a framework to flexibly manage energy use and balance thermal comfort during demand response events. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, demonstrating its ability to achieve consensus, maintain system performance, and enhance the adaptability of power grid operations under various demand response scenarios.