Heuristic Optimization of Consumer Electricity Costs Using a Generic Cost Model

Chris Ogwumike, Michael Short and Fathi Abugchem
Additional contact information
Chris Ogwumike: School of Science and Engineering, Teesside University, Middlesbrough TS1 3BA, UK
Michael Short: School of Science and Engineering, Teesside University, Middlesbrough TS1 3BA, UK
Fathi Abugchem: School of Science and Engineering, Teesside University, Middlesbrough TS1 3BA, UK

Energies, 2015, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-21

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: demand side management; smart grid; decision support system; heuristic algorithm; load scheduling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/9/1/6/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/9/1/6/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:9:y:2015:i:1:p:6-:d:61114

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().