Near-optimal scheduling of residential smart home appliances using heuristic approach

This paper presents an efficient heuristic approach for scheduling residential smart home appliances. Using available hourly prices for electricity, the starting times of a supplied set of appliances are optimized so that the economic cost of the energy consumed is reduced, while satisfying the operational and peak power constraints. The algorithm schedules appliances one after the other based on a greedy strategy. The heuristic (c.f. exact) approach is taken to reduce the computational burden to a level allowing re-optimization to take place at regular intervals by a modest computing device without specialized software, which could be embedded in a smart meter. The proposed algorithm is evaluated through a preliminary experimental study comparing the obtained costs and computation times with an exact algorithm. Results indicate that the obtained cost was within 5% of the optimal cost, while the computation time reduced by exponential factors.