Optimal Operation for Resilient Communities through a Hierarchical Load Scheduling Framework

The increasing frequency of man-made disasters as wellas extreme weather events is causing more frequentpower outages. To overcome this, resilient communitieswith on-site photovoltaic (PV) generation and batterystorage can sustain power outages and continue tooperate without sacrificing the occupants’ comfort needs.However, it remains challenging to prioritize and schedulethe loads on a community scale during off-grid operation.This paper proposes a hierarchical load schedulingframework for the optimal operation of community loadsand heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC)systems with only limited PV and batteries. The frameworkconsists of a community coordinator layer, a buildinglayer, and an appliance layer, which are separatelyformulated as rule-based resource allocation, model predictivecontrol (MPC) problems and four types of loadmodels. We discuss the unserved load ratio, batterysizes, PV curtailment, and thermal comfort satisfactionto evaluate the optimal load scheduling outcome. Theresults show the proposed framework can help maintainthe community unserved load ratio at about 6.2% duringthe simulated 48 hours.