Tabu search for the optimization of household energy consumption

This paper focuses on demand-side load management applied to the residential sector. A home automation system controlling household energy is proposed. It is decomposed into three layers: anticipation, reactive and device layers. This paper deals with an anticipation layer that allocates energy by taking into account predicted events. It consists in computing both the starting times of some services and in determining set points of others while satisfying the maximal power constraint. A constraint satisfaction problem formulation has been proposed. Because the complexity is NP-hard, a tabu search is used to solve the problem. It maximizes user comfort and minimizes energy cost. An application example is presented