A Distributed Privacy-Preserving Approach for Evaluating Response Potential of HVACs

Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems (HVACs) can participate in demand response due to their thermal inertia. However, since the capacity of a single HVAC unit is limited, aggregators are necessary to manage large-scale HVACs. Before participating in response tasks, aggregators typically need to collect data from individual HVAC units to determine their total response potential, which may infringe on user privacy. This paper proposes a privacy-preserving approach for evaluating the response potential of HVACs. By adopting a distributed communication protocol, HVACs only need to interact with their neighbors, reducing the privacy risk associated with centralized data collection. Simulations confirm that the proposed method is effective for large-scale HVAC systems while maintaining high accuracy in potential evaluation.