Optimal Cloud Computing Resource Allocation for Demand Side Management in Smart Grid

With the rapid increase of monitoring devices and controllable facilities in the demand side of electricity networks, more solid information and communication technology (ICT) resources are required to support the development of demand side management (DSM). Different from traditional computation in power systems which customizes ICT resources for mapping applications separately, DSM especially asks for scalability and economic efficiency, because there are more and more stakeholders participating in the computation process. This paper proposes a novel cost-oriented optimization model for a cloud-based ICT infrastructure to allocate cloud computing resources in a flexible and cost-efficient way. Uncertain factors including imprecise computation load prediction and unavailability of computing instances can also be considered in the proposed model. A modified priority list algorithm is specially developed in order to efficiently solve the proposed optimization model and compared with the mature simulating annealing based algorithm. Comprehensive numerical studies are fulfilled to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed cost-oriented model on reducing the operation cost of cloud platform in DSM.