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Electric Water Heaters Management via Reinforcement Learning with Time-Delay in Isolated Microgrids

Xu, J; Mahmood, H; Xiao, H; Anderlini, E; Abusara, M; (2021) Electric Water Heaters Management via Reinforcement Learning with Time-Delay in Isolated Microgrids. IEEE Access 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3112817. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

Isolated microgrids powered by renewable energy sources, battery storage, and backup diesel generators need appropriate demand response to utilize available energy and reduce diesel consumption efficiently. However, real-time demand-side management has become a significant challenge due to the communication time-delay issue. In this paper, a distributed model-free strategy is proposed to manage the demand of Electric Water Heater (EWH) units. The distributed artificial intelligence technology based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) is adopted to independently control the 150 EWHs using a virtual tariff. Two different strategies are proposed to generate the virtual tariff and they are compared to each other to investigate the impact of communication time-delay to the proposed RL algorithm in real-time control scenario. The first strategy is based on measuring the battery State of Charge (SOC) in real time while the second method is based on predicting the SOC 24-hours in advance using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN). The results show that the communication time-delay greatly influences the convergence result of the first method while the second method showed high immunity. The results also show that the proposed algorithm reduces the use of energy consumption by an average of 8.91%(6.675kW) for each EWH, which symbolizes the viability of the proposed approach.

Type: Article
Title: Electric Water Heaters Management via Reinforcement Learning with Time-Delay in Isolated Microgrids
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3112817
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3112817
Language: English
Additional information: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Keywords: Energy storage, distributed control, reinforcement learning, electric water heaters, Q-learning, time-delay
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Mechanical Engineering
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10135388
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