Optimizing Shiftable Appliance Schedules across Residential Neighbourhoods for Lower Energy Costs and Fair Billing

This early stage interdisciplinary research contributes to smart grid advancements by integrating information and communications technology and electric power systems. It aims at tackling the drawbacks of current demand-side energy management schemes by developing an agent-based energy management system that coordinates and optimizes neighbourhood-level aggregate power load. In this paper, we report on the implementation of an energy consumption scheduler for rescheduling “shiftable” household appliances at the household-level; the scheduler takes into account the consumer’s time preferences, the total hourly power consumption across neighbouring households, and a fair electricity billing mechanism. This scheduler is to be deployed in an autonomous and distributed residential energy management system to avoid load synchronization, reduce utility energy costs, and improve the load factor of the aggregate power load.