Energy Saving and System Performance - An Art of Trade-off for Controller Design

To tackle the twin challenges of sustainable energy supply and climate change, numerous efforts have been made to decarbonize the whole energy systems. Control Engineering, which concerns the automated operation of a machine or system to achieve desired target(s) and to avoid unstable or unintended disruptive behavior, has played a key role in modern industry and across the whole energy system. Advanced control technologies, such as optimal control, provide a framework to simultaneously regulate the system performance and limit control energy. However, little has been done so far to exploit the full potential of controller design in reducing the energy consumption while maintaining desirable system performance. This paper for the first time investigates the correlation between control energy consumption and system performance, and shows that this correlation is nonlinear and the controller design should be a delicate synthesis procedure to achieve better trade-off between system performance and energy saving.