Scheduling deferrable electric appliances in smart homes: a bi-objective stochastic optimization approach

Abstract

<abstract><p>In the last decades, cities have increased the number of activities and services that depends on an efficient and reliable electricity service. In particular, households have had a sustained increase of electricity consumption to perform many residential activities. Thus, providing efficient methods to enhance the decision making processes in demand-side management is crucial for achieving a more sustainable usage of the available resources. In this line of work, this article presents an optimization model to schedule deferrable appliances in households, which simultaneously optimize two conflicting objectives: the minimization of the cost of electricity bill and the maximization of users satisfaction with the consumed energy. Since users satisfaction is based on human preferences, it is subjected to a great variability and, thus, stochastic resolution methods have to be applied to solve the proposed model. In turn, a maximum allowable power consumption value is included as constraint, to account for the maximum power contracted for each household or building. Two different algorithms are proposed: a simulation-optimization approach and a greedy heuristic. Both methods are evaluated over problem instances based on real-world data, accounting for different household types. The obtained results show the competitiveness of the proposed approach, which are able to compute different compromising solutions accounting for the trade-off between these two conflicting optimization criteria in reasonable computing times. The simulation-optimization obtains better solutions, outperforming and dominating the greedy heuristic in all considered scenarios.</p></abstract>