Practical Challenges in Real-Time Demand Response

We report on a real-time demand response experiment with 100 controllable devices. The reveals several key challenges in the deployment of program, including time delays, uncertainties, characterization errors, multiple timescales, and nonlinearity, which have been largely ignored previous studies. To resolve these practical issues, we develop implement two-level multi-loop control structure integrating feed-forward proportional-integral controllers optimization solvers closed loops, eliminates steady-state errors improves dynamical performance overall building response. proposed methods are validated by Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) tests.