Design resilience of demand response systems utilizing locally communicating thermostatically controlled loads

Thermostatically Controlled Loads (TCLs) have shown great potential for Demand Response (DR) events. The focus of this study is to investigate the effects of adding communication throughout a population of TCLs on the resilience of the system. A Metric for resilience is calculated on varying populations of TCLs and verified with agent based modeling simulations. At the core of this study is an added thermostat criterion created from the combination of a proportional gain and the average compressor operating state of neighboring TCLs. Differing connection architectures are also analyzed. Resilience of the systems under different connection topologies, are calculated by analyzing algebraic connectivity at varying population sizes. The resilience analysis was verified through simulation. Results of the analysis show the effect of on delay schemes and connection architecture on stability limit of each system. Good concurrence was found between predicted and observed resilience for smaller dead-band sizes. Simulations showed varying results on the effect of a simulated attack based on location of the attack within the population.