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The increasing prevalence of electric vehicles (EVs) in the transportation sector will introduce a large number of highly flexible electric loads that EV aggregators can pool and control to provide energy and ancillary services to the wholesale electricity market. To integrate large populations of EVs into electricity market operations, aggregators must express the aggregate flexibility of the EVs under their control in the form of a small number of energy storage (battery) resources that accurately capture the supply/demand capabilities of the individual EVs as a collective. To this end, we propose a novel multi-battery flexibility model defined as a linear combination of a small number of base sets (termed batteries) that reflect the differing geometric shapes of the individual EV flexibility sets, and suggest a clustering approach to identify these base sets. We study the problem of computing a multi-battery flexibility set that has minimum Hausdorff distance to the aggregate flexibility set, subject to the constraint that the multi-battery flexibility set be a subset of the aggregate flexibility set. We show how to conservatively approximate this problem with a tractable convex program, and illustrate the performance achievable by our method with several numerical experiments., Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures, to appear in the Proceedings of the 2023 American Control Conference (ACC). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2207.07067

Plug-in electric vehicles (EVs) are widely recognized as being highly flexible electric loads that can be pooled and controlled via aggregators to provide low-cost energy and ancillary services to wholesale electricity markets. To participate in these markets, an aggregator must encode the aggregate flexibility of the population of EVs under their command as a single polytope that is compliant with existing market rules. To this end, we investigate the problem of characterizing the aggregate flexibility set of a heterogeneous population of EVs whose individual flexibility sets are given as convex polytopes in half-space representation. As the exact computation of the aggregate flexibility set -- the Minkowski sum of the individual flexibility sets -- is known to be intractable, we study the problem of computing maximum-volume inner approximations to the aggregate flexibility set by optimizing over affine transformations of a given convex polytope in half-space representation. We show how to conservatively approximate these set containment problems as linear programs that scale polynomially with the number and dimension of the individual flexibility sets. The inner approximation methods provided in this paper generalize and improve upon existing methods from the literature. We illustrate the improvement in approximation accuracy and performance achievable by our methods with numerical experiments., Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures

The participation of renewable energy sources in energy markets is challenging, mainly because of the uncertainty associated with the renewables. Aggregation of renewable energy suppliers is shown to be very effective in decreasing this uncertainty. In the present paper, we propose a cost sharing mechanism that entices the suppliers of wind, solar and other renewable resources to form or join an aggregate. In particular, we consider the effect of a bonus for surplus in supply, which is neglected in previous work. We introduce a specific proportional cost sharing mechanism, which satisfies the desired properties of such mechanisms that are introduced in the literature, e.g., budget balancedness, ex-post individual rationality and fairness. In addition, we show that the proposed mechanism results in a stable market outcome. Finally, the results of the paper are illustrated by numerical examples.

In this paper, an effective method with time complexity of $\mathcal{O}(K^{3/2}N^2\log \frac{K}{\epsilon_0})$ is introduced to find an approximation of the convex hull for $N$ points in dimension $n$, where $K$ is close to the number of vertices of the approximation. Since the time complexity is independent of dimension, this method is highly suitable for the data in high dimensions. Utilizing a greedy approach, the proposed method attempts to find the best approximate convex hull for a given number of vertices. The approximate convex hull can be a helpful substitute for the exact convex hull for on-line processes and applications that have a favorable trade off between accuracy and parsimony., Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, The more detailed version will be submitted

Residential Thermostatically Controlled Loads (TCLs) such as Air Conditioners (ACs), heat pumps, water heaters, and refrigerators have an enormous thermal storage potential for providing regulation reserve to the grid. In this paper, we study the potential resource and economic analysis of TCLs providing frequency regulation service. In particular, we show that the potential resource of TCLs in California is more than enough for both current and predicted near-future regulation requirements for the California power system. Moreover, we estimate the cost and revenue of TCLs, discuss the qualification requirements, recommended policy changes, and participation incentive methods, and compare TCLs with other energy storage technologies. We show that TCLs are potentially more cost-effective than other energy storage technologies such as flywheels, Li-ion, advanced lead acid, and Zinc Bromide batteries.

We present an analysis of a heuristic for abrupt change detection of systems with bounded state variations. The proposed analysis is based on the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) of a history matrix built from system observations. We show that monitoring the largest singular value of the history matrix can be used as a heuristic for detecting abrupt changes in the system outputs. We provide sufficient detectability conditions for the proposed heuristic. As an application, we consider detecting malicious cyber data attacks on power systems and test our proposed heuristic on the IEEE 39-bus testbed., Comment: to appear in the 2014 American Control Conference - ACC

Long horizon lengths in Moving Horizon Estimation are desirable to reach the performance limits of the full information estimator. However, the conventional MHE technique suffers from a number of deficiencies in this respect. First, the problem complexity scales at least linearly with the horizon length selected, which restrains from selecting long horizons if computational limitations are present. Second, there is no monitoring of constraint activity/inactivity which results in conducting redundant constrained minimizations even when no constraints are active. In this study we develop a Multiple-Window Moving Horizon Estimation strategy (MW-MHE) that exploits constraint inactivity to reduce the problem size in long horizon estimation problems. The arrival cost is approximated using the unconstrained full information estimator arrival cost to guarantee stability of the technique. A new horizon length selection criteria is developed based on maximum sensitivity between remote states in time. The development will be in terms of general causal descriptor systems, which includes the standard state space representation as a special case. The potential of the new estimation algorithm will be demonstrated with an example showing a significant reduction in both computation time and numerical errors compared to conventional MHE., Comment: 13 pages

Recently it has been shown that an aggregation of Thermostatically Controlled Loads (TCLs) can be utilized to provide fast regulating reserve service for power grids and the behavior of the aggregation can be captured by a stochastic battery with dissipation. In this paper, we address two practical issues associated with the proposed battery model. First, we address clustering of a heterogeneous collection and show that by finding the optimal dissipation parameter for a given collection, one can divide these units into few clusters and improve the overall battery model. Second, we analytically characterize the impact of imposing a no-short-cycling requirement on TCLs as constraints on the ramping rate of the regulation signal. We support our theorems by providing simulation results., Comment: to appear in the 2014 American Control Conference - ACC

Recovery of the initial state of a high-dimensional system can require a large number of measurements. In this paper, we explain how this burden can be significantly reduced when randomized measurement operators are employed. Our work builds upon recent results from Compressive Sensing (CS). In particular, we make the connection to CS analysis for random block diagonal matrices. By deriving Concentration of Measure (CoM) inequalities, we show that the observability matrix satisfies the Restricted Isometry Property (RIP) (a sufficient condition for stable recovery of sparse vectors) under certain conditions on the state transition matrix. For example, we show that if the state transition matrix is unitary, and if independent, randomly-populated measurement matrices are employed, then it is possible to uniquely recover a sparse high-dimensional initial state when the total number of measurements scales linearly in the sparsity level (the number of non-zero entries) of the initial state and logarithmically in the state dimension. We further extend our RIP analysis for scaled unitary and symmetric state transition matrices. We support our analysis with a case study of a two-dimensional diffusion process., Comment: A companion technical report which contains additional details on several topics from our revised submission "Observability with Random Observations" to the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Special Issue on Relaxation Methods in Identification and Estimation Problems, on July 16, 2013 - Initial submission on November 16, 2012

We derive Concentration of Measure (CoM) inequalities for randomized Toeplitz matrices. These inequalities show that the norm of a high-dimensional signal mapped by a Toeplitz matrix to a low-dimensional space concentrates around its mean with a tail probability bound that decays exponentially in the dimension of the range space divided by a quantity which is a function of the signal. For the class of sparse signals, the introduced quantity is bounded by the sparsity level of the signal. However, we observe that this bound is highly pessimistic for most sparse signals and we show that if a random distribution is imposed on the non-zero entries of the signal, the typical value of the quantity is bounded by a term that scales logarithmically in the ambient dimension. As an application of the CoM inequalities, we consider Compressive Binary Detection (CBD)., Comment: Initial Submission to the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing on December 1, 2011. Revised and Resubmitted on July 12, 2012