Multi-commodity support in profile steering

The interest in hybrid energy systems that coordinate multiple commodities simultaneously on residential level (e.g., electricity, heat, gas) is increasing. Such systems can benefit from the synergy between energy carriers to improve the overall energy system efficiency. However, dependencies between commodities make optimisation of such a system generally hard. This paper presents a planning-based multi-commodity energy management system that scales linearly with the number of commodities and connected devices. We apply our approach to balance the three phases in a low voltage grid while charging a fleet of electric vehicles. Simulation results show that our approach is capable of balancing the three phases in this network to enhance the delivered power quality. This balancing also results in a decrease of distribution losses of up to 41.2% compared to a control strategy that does not consider multiple commodities and phase balancing.