Optimal price-based control of heterogeneous thermostatically controlled loads under uncertainty using LSTM networks and genetic algorithms

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the problem of thermostatically controlled load (TCL) control through dynamic electricity prices, under partial observability of the environment and uncertainty of the control response. The problem is formulated as a Markov decision process where an agent must find a near-optimal pricing scheme using partial observations of the state and action. We propose a long-short-term memory (LSTM) network to learn the individual behaviors of TCL units. We use the aggregated information to predict the response of the TCL cluster to a pricing policy. We use this prediction model in a genetic algorithm to find the best prices in terms of profit maximization in an energy arbitrage operation. The simulation results show that the proposed method offers a profit equal to 96% of the theoretical optimal solution.