Residential power scheduling for demand response in smart grid

Abstract This paper studies the power scheduling problem for residential consumers in smart grid. In general, the consumers have two types of electric appliances. The first type of appliances have flexible starting time and work continuously with a fixed power. The second type of appliances work with a flexible power in a predefined working time. The consumers can adjust the starting time of the first type of appliances or reduce the power consumption of the second type of appliances to reduce the payments. However, this will also incur discomfort to the consumers. Assuming the electricity price is announced by the service provider ahead of time, we propose a power scheduling strategy for the residential consumers to achieve a desired trade-off between the payments and the discomfort. The power scheduling is formulated as an optimization problem including integer and continuous variables. An optimal scheduling strategy is obtained by solving the optimization problem. Simulation results demonstrate that the scheduling strategy can achieve a desired tradeoff between the payments and the discomfort.