An ADP Framework for Flexibility and Cost Aggregation: Guarantees and Open Problems

With the increasing amount of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), coordination of Distribution Grid Operators (DSOs) and Transmission Grid Operators (TSOs) is of paramount importance. Managing a large number of DERs at the TSO level is, however, challenging. To address this problem, flexibility aggregation is a topic of frequent research activities. Aggregation means to describe the \textit{combined} flexibility of the DERs at the vertical grid coupling between DSO and TSO. Existing works are often limited with respect to guaranteeing feasibility, with respect to efficient numerical implementation, and in terms of quantification of the cost of DER usage. In the present paper, we investigate aggregation based on Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP). We propose efficient numerical aggregation schemes using tools from computational geometry thus avoiding the need to solve multiple OPF problems. We rely on different variants of the DistFlow model for radial grids, which are computationally efficient. This allows to model of current and voltage limits and enables the consideration of voltage dependencies in the aggregation. Furthermore, we propose a method for cost aggregation and identify open problems of flexibility aggregation.