Residential demand response scheduling with multiclass appliances in the smart grid

In this paper, we study an electricity load scheduling problem in a residence. Compared with previous works in which only limited sets of appliances are considered, we classify various appliances into five sets considering their different energy consumption and operation characteristics, and provide mathematical models for them. With these appliance models, we propose an electricity load scheduling algorithm that controls the operation time and energy consumption level of each appliance adapting to time-of-use pricing in order to maximize the overall net utility of the residence while satisfying its budget limit. The optimization problem is formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, which is in general, difficult to solve. In order to solve the problem, we use the generalized Benders decomposition approach with which we can solve the MINLP problem easily with low computational complexity. By solving the problem, we provide an algorithm to obtain the optimal electricity load scheduling of various appliances with different energy consumption and operation characteristics in a unified way.