  Demand-side response from space heating in residential buildings can
potentially provide a huge amount of flexibility for the power system,
particularly with deep electrification of the heat sector. In this context,
this paper presents a novel distributed control strategy to coordinate space
heating across numerous residential households with diversified thermal
parameters. By employing an iterative algorithm under the game-theoretical
framework, each household adjusts its own heating schedule through demand shift
and thermal comfort compensation with the purpose of achieving individual cost
savings, whereas the aggregate peak demand is effectively shaved on the system
level. Additionally, an innovative thermal comfort model which considers both
the temporal and spatial differences in customised thermal comfort requirements
is proposed. Through a series of case studies, it is demonstrated that the
proposed space heating coordination strategy can facilitate effective energy
arbitrage for individual buildings, driving a 13.96% reduction in system
operational cost and 28.22% peak shaving. Moreover, the superiority of the
proposed approach in thermal comfort maintenance is numerically analysed based
on the proposed thermal comfort quantification model.
