Stochastic Optimal Control of Prosumers in a District Heating System

Abstract

We consider a network of residential heating systems in which several prosumers satisfy their heating and hot water demand using solar thermal collectors and services of a central producer. Overproduction of heat can either be stored in a local thermal storage or sold to the network. Our focus is the minimization of the prosumers expected discounted total cost from purchasing and selling thermal energy and running the system. This decision making problem under uncertainty about the future production and consumption of thermal energy is formulated as a stochastic optimal control problem and solved with dynamic programming techniques. We present numerical results for the value function and the optimal control.