IEEE Electrification Magazine - December 2016 - 21

Hours

Load

Hours

Load

(a)

(b)

(c)

Figure 5. An illustration of the mitigation of a short-term imbalance: (a) ideal, (b) business-as-usual, and (c) transactive control.

of equipment. Based on available information, many
buildings consume 10-30% of excess energy because they
do not employ advanced control strategies; existing
strategies are not properly managed, which leads to overrides and occupant discomfort. Several VOLTTRON applications have been designed and developed and are being
tested on buildings. These algorithms automatically
identify the operational problem or an advanced control
opportunity and report them to the building operator, or,
in some cases, the algorithms have the ability to automatically self-correct the problem, as shown in Figure 6.
The measures that can be automatically detected and
corrected include automatic schedule adjustments,
damper minimum flow adjustments, and thermostat
adjustments as well as dynamic resets to static pressure,
supply-air temperature, condenser chilled- and hotwater temperatures, and chilled- and hot-water differential pressure set points.

Configuration
Information

Building
System

Fault
Detection

Fault
Diagnosis

Actionable
Information

Autocorrection

Figure 6. The schematic of the self-correcting process.

For Further reading
closing Thoughts
This article described an open-source software platform
of the future, VOLTTRON; its services; and a few energy
efficiency and grid service use cases. Although only a
few specific use cases were reported, a number of other
use cases and applications are available to run on the
platform. The platform is being continually enhanced
with new security and management tools while the
partners develop additional applications.

Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge the Buildings Technologies
Office of the U.S. DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and
Renewable Energy for supporting the research and development effort.

GitHub. VOLTTRON Distributed Control System. [Online].
Available: https://github.com/VOLTTRON/volttron
S. Somasundaram, R. G. Pratt, B. A. Akyol, N. Fernandez, N.
A. Foster, S. Katipamula, E. T. Mayhorn, A. Somani, A. C. Steckley, and Z.T. Taylor, "Transaction-based building controls
framework," Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland,
WA, Rep. PNNL-23302, 2014, vol. 1.
B. A. Akyol, J. N. Haack, B. J. Carpenter, S. Katipamula, R. G.
Lutes, and G. Hernandez, "Transaction-based building controls framework," Pacific Northwest National Laboratory,
Richland, WA, Rep. PNNL-24395, July 2015, vol. 2.
S. Katipamula, R. G. Lutes, G. Hernandez, J. N. Haack, and B.
A. Akyol, "Transactional network: Improving efficiency and
enabling grid services for building," Sci. Technol. Built Environment, vol. 22, no. 6, pp. 643-654, 2016.
H. Hao, C. D. Corbin, K. Kalsi, and R. G. Pratt, "Transactive
control of commercial buildings for demand response," IEEE
Trans. Power Syst., vol. PP, no. 99, pp. 1-1, Apr. 2016.
IEEE Electrific ation Magazine / d ec em be r 2 0 1 6

https://www.github.com/VOLTTRON/volttron

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Electrification Magazine - December 2016