Intelligent Scheduling of Heat Pump to Minimize the Cost of Electricity

Space heating is responsible for a significant portion of energy consumption in the residential sector. As such, space heating has a great potential for energy savings. The heat pump is an important energy conservation option that allows modification of residential energy demand profile and subsequent reduction of electricity consumption and costs. Living comfort of the residents is the other side of the coin that also must be considered during the heating optimization process. This article presents an intelligent approach to heat pump scheduling problem based on metaheuristic optimization algorithms. In particular, we consider mutation-based binary particle swarm optimization and genetic algorithm. Simulation results confirm that the proposed approach can optimize the heat pump scheduling task without sacrificing the thermal comfort of residents.