Coordinated scheduling of multiple households' appliances with leveled load profiles and consumers' preferences

This paper addresses the multiple households' residential load scheduling 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 for five households with leveled load profile while considering the consumers' preferences. A myriad of variants of the problem has been addressed in literature, however, studies considering minimization of both electricity cost and peak load while considering the consumers' inconveniences in a multiple-household environment have not received sufficient attention. Ignoring coordination between multiple households while solving the residential load scheduling problem could result in unplanned synchronization of peak loads of the individual consumer, which could result in an unmanaged aggregated peak load. Reducing the overall peak load is an important goal for all the actors in the power grid. This study, therefore, proposes a multi-objective 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, the schedule inconvenience, and the peak load over the day. A case study of five households shows that the proposed schedules with coordination between multiple households could realize a significant reduction in the aggregated peak load.