Optimal residential load scheduling in smart grid: A comprehensive approach

In this paper, as a fundamental problem in smart grid, the residential load scheduling is studied in a comprehensive way. The main contributions lie in twofold. First, three indices, i.e., the power consumption expense, the robustness of schedule subject to uncertain electricity price and the satisfaction of customer, are taken into full consideration. We propose to optimize simultaneously the three indices via convex optimization. Second, in order to fully characterize the operation states of appliances, both binary and continuous variables are used, which results in a hybrid optimization problem. The relaxation technique is utilized to tackle the hybrid optimization problem. The performance of the proposed approach is illustrated by simulations. Both peak-to-average ratio of power load and variation of power load are reduced.