Appliance operation scheduling for electricity consumption optimization

This paper concerns the problem of optimally scheduling a set of appliances at the end-user premises. The user's energy fee varies over time, and moreover, in the context of smart grids, the user may receive a reward from an energy aggregator if he/she reduces consumption during certain time intervals. In a household, the problem is to decide when to schedule the operation of the appliances, in order to meet a number of goals, namely overall costs, climatic comfort level and timeliness. We devise a model accounting for a typical household user, and present computational results showing that it can be efficiently solved in real-life instances.