Online Smoothed Demand Management

Abstract

We introduce and study a class of online problems called online smoothed demand management $(\texttt{OSDM})$, motivated by paradigm shifts in grid integration and energy storage for large energy consumers such as data centers. In $\texttt{OSDM}$, an operator makes two decisions at each time step: an amount of energy to be purchased, and an amount of energy to be delivered (i.e., used for computation). The difference between these decisions charges (or discharges) the operator's energy storage (e.g., a battery). Two types of demand arrive online: base demand, which must be covered at the current time, and flexible demand, which can be satisfied at any time steps before a demand-specific deadline $Δ_t$. The operator's goal is to minimize a cost (subject to the constraints above) that combines a cost of purchasing energy, a cost for delivering energy (if applicable), and smoothness penalties on the purchasing and delivery rates to discourage fluctuations and encourage ``grid healthy'' decisions. $\texttt{OSDM}$ generalizes several problems in the online algorithms literature while being the first to fully model applications of interest. We propose a competitive algorithm called $\texttt{PAAD}$ (partitioned accounting \& aggregated decisions) and show it achieves the optimal competitive ratio. To overcome the pessimism typical of worst-case analysis, we also propose a novel learning framework that provides guarantees on the worst-case competitive ratio (i.e., to provide robustness against nonstationarity) while allowing end-to-end differentiable learning of the best algorithm on historical instances of the problem. We evaluate our algorithms in a case study of a grid-integrated data center with battery storage, showing that $\texttt{PAAD}$ effectively solves the problem and end-to-end learning achieves substantial performance improvements compared to $\texttt{PAAD}$.