No Arabic abstract
Off-grid systems have emerged as a sustainable and cost-effective solution for rural electrification. In sub-Sarahan Africa (SSA), a great number of solar-hybrid microgrids have been installed or planned, operating stand-alone or grid-tied to a weak grid. Presence of intermittent energy sources necessitates the provision of energy storage for system balancing. Reliability and economic performance of those rural microgrids strongly depend on specific control strategies. This work develops a predictive control framework dedicated to rural microgrids incorporating a temperature-dependent battery degradation model. Based on a scalable DC PV-battery microgrid, the realistic simulation shows its superior performance in the reliability improvement and cost reduction. Compared with the day-ahead control without the temperature-dependent battery degradation model, this control strategy can improve the reliability by 5.5% and extend the lead-acid battery life time by 26%, equivalent to lowering the levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) by 13%.
Appropriate greenhouse temperature should be maintained to ensure crop production while minimizing energy consumption. Even though weather forecasts could provide a certain amount of information to improve control performance, it is not perfect and forecast error may cause the temperature to deviate from the acceptable range. To inherent uncertainty in weather that affects control accuracy, this paper develops a data-driven robust model predictive control (MPC) approach for greenhouse temperature control. The dynamic model is obtained from thermal resistance-capacitance modeling derived by the Building Resistance-Capacitance Modeling (BRCM) toolbox. Uncertainty sets of ambient temperature and solar radiation are captured by support vector clustering technique, and they are further tuned for better quality by training-calibration procedure. A case study that implements the carefully chosen uncertainty sets on robust model predictive control shows that the data-driven robust MPC has better control performance compared to rule-based control, certainty equivalent MPC, and robust MPC.
We study operations of a battery energy storage system under a baseline-based demand response (DR) program with an uncertain schedule of DR events. Baseline-based DR programs may provide undesired incentives to inflate baseline consumption in non-event days, in order to increase apparent DR reduction in event days and secure higher DR payments. Our goal is to identify and quantify such incentives. To understand customer decisions, we formulate the problem of determining hourly battery charging and discharge schedules to minimize expected net costs, defined as energy purchase costs minus energy export rebates and DR payments, over a sufficiently long time horizon (e.g., a year). The complexity of this stochastic optimization problem grows exponentially with the time horizon considered. To obtain computationally tractable solutions, we propose using multistage model predictive control with scenario sampling. Numerical results indicate that our solutions are near optimal (e.g., within 3% from the optimum in the test cases). Finally, we apply our solutions to study an example residential customer with solar photovoltaic and battery systems participating in a typical existing baseline-based DR program. Results reveal that over 66% of the average apparent load reduction during DR events could result from inflation of baseline consumption during non-event days.
The rapidly growing use of lithium-ion batteries across various industries highlights the pressing issue of optimal charging control, as charging plays a crucial role in the health, safety and life of batteries. The literature increasingly adopts model predictive control (MPC) to address this issue, taking advantage of its capability of performing optimization under constraints. However, the computationally complex online constrained optimization intrinsic to MPC often hinders real-time implementation. This paper is thus proposed to develop a framework for real-time charging control based on explicit MPC (eMPC), exploiting its advantage in characterizing an explicit solution to an MPC problem, to enable real-time charging control. The study begins with the formulation of MPC charging based on a nonlinear equivalent circuit model. Then, multi-segment linearization is conducted to the original model, and applying the eMPC design to the obtained linear models leads to a charging control algorithm. The proposed algorithm shifts the constrained optimization to offline by precomputing explicit solutions to the charging problem and expressing the charging law as piecewise affine functions. This drastically reduces not only the online computational costs in the control run but also the difficulty of coding. Extensive numerical simulation and experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed eMPC charging control framework and algorithm. The research results can potentially meet the needs for real-time battery management running on embedded hardware.
This paper proposes an off-line algorithm, called Recurrent Model Predictive Control (RMPC), to solve general nonlinear finite-horizon optimal control problems. Unlike traditional Model Predictive Control (MPC) algorithms, it can make full use of the current computing resources and adaptively select the longest model prediction horizon. Our algorithm employs a recurrent function to approximate the optimal policy, which maps the system states and reference values directly to the control inputs. The number of prediction steps is equal to the number of recurrent cycles of the learned policy function. With an arbitrary initial policy function, the proposed RMPC algorithm can converge to the optimal policy by directly minimizing the designed loss function. We further prove the convergence and optimality of the RMPC algorithm thorough Bellman optimality principle, and demonstrate its generality and efficiency using two numerical examples.
We propose Kernel Predictive Control (KPC), a learning-based predictive control strategy that enjoys deterministic guarantees of safety. Noise-corrupted samples of the unknown system dynamics are used to learn several models through the formalism of non-parametric kernel regression. By treating each prediction step individually, we dispense with the need of propagating sets through highly non-linear maps, a procedure that often involves multiple conservative approximation steps. Finite-sample error bounds are then used to enforce state-feasibility by employing an efficient robust formulation. We then present a relaxation strategy that exploits on-line data to weaken the optimization problem constraints while preserving safety. Two numerical examples are provided to illustrate the applicability of the proposed control method.