An ILP Based Algorithm for Optimal Customer Selection for Demand Response in SmartGrids

Demand Response (DR) events are initiated by utilities during peak demand periods to curtail consumption. They ensure system reliability and minimize the utility´s expenditure. Selection of the right customers and strategies is critical for a DR event. An effective DR scheduling algorithm minimizes the curtailment error which is the absolute difference between the achieved curtailment value and the target. State-of-the-art heuristics exist for customer selection, however their curtailment errors are unbounded and can be as high as 70%. In this work, we develop an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation for optimally selecting customers and curtailment strategies that minimize the curtailment error during DR events in SmartGrids. We perform experiments on real world data obtained from the University of Southern California´s SmartGrid and show that our algorithm achieves near exact curtailment values with errors in the range of 10^-17 to 10^-5, which are within the range of numerical errors. We compare our results against the state-of-the-art heuristic being deployed in practice in the USC SmartGrid. We show that for the same set of available customerstrategy pairs our algorithm performs 10^-3 to 10^-7 times better in terms of the curtailment errors incurred.