Price-based optimization of air conditioners by combined temperature set-point and main-power ON/OFF control

Air conditioners (ACs) can provide demand response (DR) by incentive or price signals. However, existing optimization methods select power-level or continuous temperature set-point signal as decision variables, which are difficult to be implemented on real ACs. To fill this gap, this paper proposes an optimization method based on combined temperature set-point and main-power ON/OFF control, which can be implemented by infrared remote control. The optimization problem is developed considering the AC's thermodynamics, based on which the optimization problem is simplified, linearized and solved based on mixed integer linear programming (MILP). The testing results show that the proposed combined optimization method can achieve competitive performance as direct electrical power-level control method. Experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness in practical control systems.