A distributed approach to emergency demand response in geo-distributed mixed-use buildings

Emergency Demand Response (EDR) has attracted research attention in recent years with its critical role in smart grids. Even though there are numerous potential participants for EDR, we especially focus on EDR, especially within datacenters and buildings, due to their huge power consumption yet flexible control knobs for power shedding. To reduce the deployment cost, many edge datacenters now are co-located inside buildings, which are responsible for power and IT infrastructure (called mixed-use buildings). In this paper, we consider a scenario that has not been addressed in the literature, in which multiple loads in geographically Distributed Mixed-use Buildings (geo-MUBs) can team up to participate EDR. We then design a mechanism that can coordinate tenants and geo-distributed buildings to minimize the system cost for EDR based on a robustly distributed framework, Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). In this mechanism, we also design a privacy-preserving scheme to conceal all tenants' transactions by using a lightweight algorithm. Simulation results show that our proposed method can reduce the total cost by 48.8% compared to existing approaches while satisfying all tenants constraints.