Integrated Management of Energy Resources in the Residential Sector Using Evolutionary Computation

Abstract

The gradual transformation of electricity distribution networks to smart grids is expected to provide the technological infrastructure allowing demand to be treated as a responsive resource, enabling end-users to make optimized decisions concerning the integrated use of domestic energy resources (i.e. manageable loads, storage, and local generation systems). The support to this active use of demand asks for the development of optimization models of combinatorial nature, given the diversity of comfort requirements, technical constraints, appliances to be scheduled, etc. in a near real-time framework. Evolutionary algorithms have been used to cope with the combinatorial characteristics of models, large and irregular search spaces, and also multiple objectives of economic, environmental, quality of service, and technical nature. This chapter makes a review of the use of evolutionary algorithms to optimize the use of domestic energy resources, identifying the main characteristics of the approach, including decision variables, sets of constraints and objective functions, as well as the main algorithmic features to obtain usable solutions.