Design of a Power Scheduler Based on the Heuristic for Preemptive Appliances

This paper presents a design and evaluates the performance of a power consumption scheduler in smart grid homes, aiming at reducing the peak load in individual homes or buildings with reasonable computation time. Following the task model consisting of actuation time, operation length, deadline, and a consumption profile, the scheduler first investigates all the allocations for nonpreemptive tasks. Next, for each partial allocation, slots having the smallest power consumption are selected and assigned to the preemptive task, reducing the search space complexity for a preemptive task from O(MM/2) to O(1). The performance measurement result, obtained from the implementation of the proposed scheme and comparison with the optimal schedule, shows that the accuracy loss remains below 3.9 % for the number of tasks less than 9 and also below 7.6 % for the space size distribution. Moreover, the proposed scheme can find the optimal schedule more than 80 % for the given parameter sets. After all, our scheme can decide the power consumption schedule promptly with quite a small loss of accuracy.