Heuristic Optimization of Consumer Electricity Costs Using a Generic Cost Model

Autor: Chris Ogwumike, Michael Short, Fathi Abugchem
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2015
Předmět:
Zdroj: Energies, Vol 9, Iss 1, Pp 6-0 (2015)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1996-1073
DOI: 10.3390/en9010006
Popis: Many new demand response strategies are emerging for energy management in smart grids. Real-Time Energy Pricing (RTP) is one important aspect of consumer Demand Side Management (DSM), which encourages consumers to participate in load scheduling. This can help reduce peak demand and improve power system efficiency. The use of Intelligent Decision Support Systems (IDSSs) for load scheduling has become necessary in order to enable consumers to respond to the changing economic value of energy across different hours of the day. The type of scheduling problem encountered by a consumer IDSS is typically NP-hard, which warrants the search for good heuristics with efficient computational performance and ease of implementation. This paper presents an extensive evaluation of a heuristic scheduling algorithm for use in a consumer IDSS. A generic cost model for hourly pricing is utilized, which can be configured for traditional on/off peak pricing, RTP, Time of Use Pricing (TOUP), Two-Tier Pricing (2TP) and combinations thereof. The heuristic greedily schedules controllable appliances to minimize smart appliance energy costs and has a polynomial worst-case computation time. Extensive computational experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm and the obtained results indicate the gaps between the optimal achievable costs are negligible.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals