Multi-class appliance scheduling for cost-effective energy management with constraint and user preferences

For decades, the electrical power grid worldwide has transformed from traditional to the smart power grid, focusing on its transparency to both utility and consumer. The energy management systems play a substantial part in demand response within the smart power grid umbrella, enabling demand-side management at the residential level. These systems generate the consumption profile of appliances and reduce the burden on end-user in scheduling appliances operations. With these consumption profiles of past usage, there is a possibility to generate a time window containing user preferable time slots for appliance operation for the next day. Using this time window, one can generate a cost-effective schedule-pattern autonomously. In this regard, this article proposes a home energy-demand management scheme consisting of a time window generator and a schedule-pattern generator to generate a cost-effectively comfortable schedule-pattern with demand threshold constraint. Multi-class appliances home enabled with a net-meter demonstrate the proposed approach’s effectiveness. The simulation results showcase that the proposed approach helps the user to save electricity bills with constraint preserving comfort.