Design and Development of Brownout Control Strategy Using End-Point Load Control

Imbalances in electricity supply and demand are a significant problem in developing countries resulting in rolling blackouts/load shedding. Due to the inconvenience caused by blackouts, several brownout (partial blackout) strategies have been proposed. In this paper, we resort to keeping the electricity demand of a household within a specified threshold. Our approach combines two distinct methods of end-point load (appliance) control: priority-based techniques and combinatorial optimization-based techniques to create a hybrid approach that gives users flexibility in configuring their preferences on-the-fly. We have quantified the user preferences using the Analytical Hierarchy Process, which is useful for solving such Multi-Criteria Decision-Making problems.