Project partners from Athens University of Economics and Business will present the papers: “Flexibility Management for Multi-Energy Consumers with Shared Bill or Rewards” and “Fair Thermal Demand Response for Flexibility Provision in Multi-Energy District Heating Systems” at the IEEE International Conference on Communications, Control, and Computing Technologies for Smart Grids, which takes place from 29 September to 2 October 2025.
Preprints are available at Zenodo (click paper title below to see the preprint).
Abstract
Demand-side flexibility management (DSFM) aims to adjust the demand of a consumer community, so as to match energy supply. However, when multiple energy sources are available at the customer premises, DSFM of one energy source may impact the demand vector of another. Also, the participation of one consumer in the flexibility event may affect other ones when their financial interests are shared, i.e., by means of a shared energy bill and/or flexibility rewards. In this paper, we define four different mathematical models for DSFM of consumers with shared bill and/or shared flexibility rewards that can use multiple energy sources and have thermal comfort constraints. We study the incentives of consumers for energy flexibility provision at a particular slot considering user utility loss and flexibility rewards. We also consider the case of hidden information on user-utility functions for energy flexibility maximization for which we propose a distributed algorithm. Moreover, we specify a model of a joint objective for the provision of a specific multi-energy flexibility amount, where flexibility rewards are shared among users upon success in a public-good setting. Finally, we model the provision of only thermal flexibility over multiple time slots. All mathematical problems defined are solved and studied by means of extensive numerical evaluations.
Abstract
District heating systems operate with multiple sources for heat generation. Integrating additional, especially renewable energy sources to the energy mix, while cost-efficient and greener, may jeopardize meeting thermal-energy demand. Moreover, employing district heating systems to provide flexibility to the power grid appears as a win-win scenario due to the high thermal inertia of buildings and the cheap storage of thermal energy. In this paper, we propose an innovative method for thermal demand response (DR) for multi-energy district heating systems with thermostatically controlled loads that participate in flexibility markets. Our approach aims to maximize the provider’s profit from selling flexibility to the power grid and multi-source heating energy to consumers, while adjusting thermal energy demand to production and ensuring an equitable distribution of thermal discomfort across consumers. In particular, we prove that, under the optimal solution, discomfort is allocated proportionally to the actual reduction in power consumption, thereby aligning financial incentives for flexibility provision with each consumer’s true contribution. Both the temperature set-point adjustments and the associated compensations are determined computationally efficiently by solving a convex optimization problem. The introduced formulation integrates indoor temperature dynamics with a novel spot utility function. This function captures user discomfort using minimum information and without requiring detailed users’ economic modeling, thus rendering our approach practically applicable. Our numerical experiments validate the effectiveness, the computational efficiency and the fairness of the proposed method.
