Transactive control for grid-interactive efficient commercial buildings

Transactive control (TC) is a type of distributed control strategy that uses market mechanisms to coordinate distinct objectives of individual entities. Through grid-interactive efficient buildings, TC can help achieve power balance in the electrical power grid under high penetration of renewable energy. This paper presents a standard TC approach for commercial heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems. This TC approach includes a flexible market structure to accommodate the variances in system configurations of HVAC systems, and an extensible market-based control process to support various demand response (DR) services. In addition, we develop a software workflow for deploying this TC approach. The software workflow is based on VOLTTRON, which is a distributed sensing and control software platform, and encapsulates the process of deploying decentralized control architecture and market-based control on a large scale. Case studies were conducted with both building energy simulations and field tests. The results show that TC is effective at providing real time price, demand limiting, and load following DR services with the studied HVAC systems.