A distributed coordination framework for on-line scheduling and power demand balancing of households communities

The development of energy management systems (EMS) has attracted increasing attention during the last years. One of the main goals of EMS is to balance the power usage and generation, while also maintaining the quality of life (QoL) of the users. In this paper, a distributed coordination framework for on-line scheduling of appliances and control of the aggregated power demand of households is proposed. Each household consists of a set of appliances, and each appliance is modeled using a probabilistic generative model of its power usage profile, which can be updated through the day to indicate changes in user preferences. The coordination framework is formulated as a receding horizon distributed optimization, where the households´ QoL, and the deviation from a scheduled usage are taken into account. The implemented distributed optimization can be seen as a negotiation among the households and a coordinator: the coordinator seeks to balance the aggregated power consumption by minimizing the deviation from a scheduled aggregated power usage, while each household tries not to deviate much from its preferred usage pattern.