Measurement of global peak load reduction by power consumption scheduling for smart places

The smart grid is a future power network capable of making the power system more intelligent taking advantage of sophisticated information technologies and two-way communication. The information technology allows efficient demand side management which reshapes the power consumption by scheduling the operation of electric devices and equipments in smart homes, buildings, farms, and the like. The peak load reduction in each scheduling grid unit leads to the global load shifting and peak reduction. In this regard, this paper measures the global peak load in the union of multiple grid units which can cooperatively purchase electricity from power providers. Following the task model consist of actuation time, operation length, deadline, and a consumption profile, the scheduler linearly copies the profile entry or maps a combinatory vector to the allocation table one by one according to the task type, which can be either preemptive or nonpreemptive. The proposed scheme expands the search space recursively to traverse all the feasible allocations for a task set. A pilot implementation of this scheduling method reduces the peak load by up to 23.1 % for the given task set. Cconstraint processing mechanism which prunes a search branch when the partial peak value already exceeds the current best. In addition, local peak reduction brings global peak reduction by up to 16 % for the home-scale scheduling units without any global coordination, avoiding uncontrollable peak resonance. Key–Words: Smart grid, power consumption scheduling, global peak reduction, prototype implementation