Towards Consumer-Oriented Demand Response Systems

Consumer acceptance is a must-have for deploying and managing successful demand response systems. Yet, recent research trends favor automated solutions that consider end consumers as passive agents. This paper explores the notion of considering consumers as active agents that interfere with the optimal plan of a demand response system. We simulate an energy community by implementing a state-of-the-art demand response system. Active consumers are modeled to be inflexible using multi-criteria decision-making methods. Results show that the greater the number of inflexible consumers, the greater the impact on the shape of the community's aggregate demand profile. Further studies should consider the impact of this cost and inflexible consumers in their numerical analysis.