Evaluation of a heuristic approach for efficient scheduling of residential smart home appliances

Load scheduling will play an important role in achieving Demand Response (DR) at the consumption level of the emerging smart grid. This paper presents the evaluation of a heuristic approach for scheduling residential smart home appliances. The proposed heuristic schedules appliances one after the other in accordance with a greedy strategy without backtracking. This is such that the worst-case computation time is reduced compared to an exact search, at the expense of a potential loss of optimality in the obtained solution. In this paper the performance of the proposed heuristic is evaluated against an exact algorithm across the course of a full year using representative hourly prices of electricity. The results verify the suitability of the algorithm for the implementation of residential energy management decision support system.