Near optimal demand-side energy management under real-time demand-response pricing

In this paper, we present demand-side energy management under real-time demand-response pricing as a task scheduling problem which is NP-hard. Using minmax as the objective, we show that the schedule produced by our minMax scheduling algorithm has a number of salient advantages: significant peak-shaving, cost reduction, and risk-aversion for the consumers. We prove that our algorithm finds near-optimal solutions and our simulation study show that the actual performance is better than the worst-case bound. The algorithm is simple to implement and efficient at the scale of large enterprises.