Distributed Load Balancing of District Heating Systems : A Small-scale Experiment

We present results from an experiment where the effects of automatic flow control at a single substation is compared to automatic cooperative concurrent flow control at multiple substations. The latter approach is made possible by equipping individual substations with some computing power and integrating them into a communications network. Software agents, whose purpose is to cooperate with other software agents (substations) and to invoke reductions, are connected to each substation. The experiment show that it is possible to automatically load balance a small district heating network using agent technology, e.g., to perform automatic peak clipping and load shifting