Uncertainty-Aware Household Appliance Scheduling Considering Dynamic Electricity Pricing in Smart Home

High quality demand side management has become indispensable in the smart grid infrastructure for enhanced energy reduction and system control. In this paper, a new demand side management technique, namely, a new energy efficient scheduling algorithm, is proposed to arrange the household appliances for operation such that the monetary expense of a customer is minimized based on the time-varying pricing model. The proposed algorithm takes into account the uncertainties in household appliance operation time and intermittent renewable generation. Moreover, it considers the variable frequency drive and capacity-limited energy storage. Our technique first uses the linear programming to efficiently compute a deterministic scheduling solution without considering uncertainties. To handle the uncertainties in household appliance operation time and energy consumption, a stochastic scheduling technique, which involves an energy consumption adaptation variable beta, is used to model the stochastic energy consumption patterns for various household appliances. To handle the intermittent behavior of the energy generated from the renewable resources, the offline static operation schedule is adapted to the runtime dynamic scheduling considering variations in renewable energy. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Compared to a traditional scheduling scheme which models typical household appliance operations in the traditional home scenario, the proposed deterministic linear programming based scheduling scheme achieves up to 45% monetary expense reduction, and the proposed stochastic design scheme achieves up to 41% monetary expense reduction. Compared to a worst case design where an appliance is assumed to consume the maximum amount of energy, the proposed stochastic design which considers the stochastic energy consumption patterns achieves up to 24% monetary expense reduction without violating the target trip rate of 0.5%. Furthermore, the proposed energy consumption scheduling algorithm can always generate the scheduling solution within 10 seconds, which is fast enough for household appliance applications.