Scheduling Interdependent Smart Appliances with Mixed-Preemption Policy for Peak Load Minimization

ABSTRACT

Demand response has been one of the efficient and highly effective energy management solutions for the smart grid environment, which uses various load curtailment and scheduling policies to minimize energy consumption and peak load demand. Recent advances in direct load control techniques show a significant reduction in peak load demand, resulting in smoother load profiles. However, a majority of the existing work misses out on the practical aspects where appliances are of mixed categories, viz., preemptive, non-preemptive, deferrable, non-deferrable, etc. In this paper, we consider addressing the problem of scheduling deferrable and non-deferrable appliances that have inter-dependency constraints among them. Considering the complexity of the problem, we propose a greedy algorithm to obtain near-optimal solutions relatively quicker than the optimal solutions. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been evaluated and compared with existing algorithms on real-world power consumption data. The results obtained show that the proposed mechanism is highly efficient and produces schedules with a $14\mathrm{\%}$ lesser peak as compared to the existing algorithms.

KEYWORDS:

• Heuristic algorithm
• Scheduling
• Peak load reduction
• Direct load control
• Demand response
• Smart grid

Acknowledgements

A preliminary version of this work was accepted and presented in The 32nd International Conference on VLSI Design & The 18th International Conference on Embedded Design, New Delhi, January 2019 [20].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nilotpal Chakraborty

Nilotpal Chakraborty received the BTech degree in information technology from Assam University, Silchar, India in 2010, the MTech degree in systems management from Devi Ahilya University, Indore, India, in 2014, and the PhD degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Patna, India, in 2019. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, Denmark. His research interests include smart grid, demand side management and energy optimization, security and cryptography. Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Arijit Mondal

Arijit Mondal received BTech (2001) in electrical engineering, MS (2004) and PhD (2010) in computer science and engineering, all from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India. He is currently working as Assistant Professor in the Center of Excellence in Artificial Intelligence, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, India. Previously, he was as Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Patna, India. He also worked for Berkeley Design Automation for around three years and briefly worked for Cadence Design System. His research interests include embedded control systems, CAD for VLSI, smart grid and deep learning. Email: [email protected]

Samrat Mondal

Samrat Mondal received the PhD degree from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, in 2010. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, India. Before joining IIT Patna, he held a faculty position in DAIICT Gandhinagar for about one year. He has also served as a Visiting Associate Professor at University of Denver, Colorado, the US for 11 months, and as a visiting scholar at National Semiconductor Corporation, Santa Clara, CA, USA, for almost seven months. He has published several research papers in reputed international journals and conferences. His primary research interests include security and privacy, database and data mining, and efficient energy management.

Dr Samrat has served as a Technical Program Committee member of many international conferences. He also served as a reviewer of journals such as the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, Computers and Security, etc. He has received multiple research grants from the Science and Engineering Research Board, Government of India. Email: [email protected]