Agent-based power management in apartment buildings: Tenant preferences and distributed energy resources

Apartment buildings (APBs) consist of multiple residential spaces and common facilities, unlike single-family buildings, and have correspondingly diverse energy demands; however, household preferences and behaviors have received little attention so far. Therefore, bidirectional flows between households and the APB must be considered to manage the APB energy demands by considering dynamic relationships built by households with preferences and behaviors. This study presents a demand-side management system called the unified home energy management system (U-HEMS), which considers distributed energy resources (DERs) for the APB. The U-HEMS was developed by bidirectional flows of management and decision-making processes for households and the APB. In the management process from the household to the APB, the APB power demands were optimized using a two-stage system, whereas in the decision-making process from the APB to the households, the next actions expressed by weighting factors of the household side were determined for the management process based on an agent-based model. The functionality and performance of the U-HEMS were compared with those of conventional approaches for a 100-unit APB, and five case studies were conducted to analyze their power demands considering different aspects: decision-making process, combinations of households' preferences, reward system, penetration of electric vehicles, and DER capacities. The results reveal that the U-HEMS effectively reduces the overall costs and total peak power demand because a bidirectional model considers the dynamic relationships between households in the APB and DER operations subject to the time-varying pricing policy. Further studies are needed to assess seasonal effects on APB demands.