This work concerns design of control systems for "Demand Dispatch" to obtain ancillary services to the power grid by harnessing inherent flexibility in many loads.  With careful design, the grid operator can harness this flexibility to regulate supply-demand balance.  The deviation in aggregate power consumption can be controlled just as generators provide ancillary service today.  

 

The talk will focus on design of local control algorithms that make the aggregate of loads appear as a passive input-output system, while maintaining strict QoS constraints for each load.  The mathematical foundations are based on a new approach to Markov Decision Processes in which the optimality equations are solved via a single ordinary differential equation.