Electrothermal coupling modeling of air-conditioning-building systems and aggregated direct load control dispatch tracking for office parks

Objective To propose an electrothermal coupling modeling and hierarchical coordinated optimization framework for the systematic integration of aggregated direct load control demand response of office park air-conditioning loads. Methods A unit-level electrothermal coupling model is first established, incorporating building envelope thermal storage effects and dynamic air-conditioning energy efficiency characteristics to capture the full cascading relationship from electrical power input through heating output to indoor temperature variation; a two-stage parameter identification procedure based on operational data is provided for model calibration. A office park-level aggregated model is then constructed via hierarchical clustering and capacity-weighted parameter equivalence, reducing optimization dimensionality while limiting aggregation accuracy loss to below 8%. On this basis, a hierarchical coordinated optimization framework is designed, integrating upper-level multi-objective dispatch optimization with lower-level model predictive control to coordinate grid command tracking with occupant comfort assurance. Results Simulation validation on a 15-building, 120,000 m2 office park demonstrates that the proposed method achieves a dispatch tracking normalized root mean square error of 3.4%-a 52.8% reduction relative to a simplified model baseline and an 86.2% reduction relative to an uncoordinated baseline-while reducing the temperature comfort violation duration ratio to 2.1%, a 67% improvement over the simplified model approach. The average control response delay is reduced to 3.2 min, compared with 8.7 min for the simplified model method. Indoor temperature prediction root mean square error is controlled within 0.35 °C, and the total computation time for a full 10-h scheduling day remains below 50 s. Conclusion The proposed electrothermal coupling modeling and hierarchical coordinated optimization framework effectively improves dispatch tracking accuracy, temperature comfort, and control response speed for aggregated air-conditioning load demand response in office parks, confirming the real-time feasibility of the proposed framework.