An optimal load schedule of household appliances with leveled load profile and consumer's preferences

This paper addresses the residential demand response problem through the scheduling of typical home appliances while incorporating more realistic aspects. The objective of this study is to generate an optimal load schedule of home appliances with leveled load profile while considering the consumer's preferences, which includes preferred schedule for some appliances. A myriad of variants of the problem has been addressed in literature. However, studies that consider minimization of both electricity cost and peak load while considering the consumer's inconveniences have not received sufficient attention. Ignoring minimization of peak load while solving this problem could result in peak shifting rather than peak smoothing. In some extreme cases, the traditional models for load shifting/scheduling could cause a new peak at another hour. Reducing the peak load is an important goal for all the actors in the power grid. This study, therefore, proposes a mixed integer programming optimization model under a time-of-use electricity tariff. The objective function minimizes the weighted score of three terms: the electricity cost and earn the relevant incentive, the schedule inconvenience and the maximum/peak load over the day. A case study shows that a consumer could realize a significant electricity cost saving compared to two existing schedules. Furthermore, results demonstrate that the peak load could be greatly reduced and a smoothed and leveled load profile could be obtained.