Optimizing Load Schedule for Building Energy Management in Smart Grids

In this paper, scheduling and control of appliance's energy consumption in a household or a small office building is studied. The household appliances include Heating, Ventilating and Air Conditioning (HVAC), and deferrable loads such as Electric Vehicle (EV) and washer/dryer. The appliances in the office building include HVAC, non-deferrable and non-interruptible loads such as computers/servers as well as deferrable and interruptible loads such as batch printing/photocopying. Given the temperature and price forecasts, a Linear Programming (LP) model for the system is derived to maximize the user comfort. The paper also presents a heuristic solution, namely Comfort Prioritizing Greedy (CPG), which employs iterative greedy algorithm to prioritize user comfort and enables the scheduling even in case of blocking. We compare our proposed greedy algorithm with the bin-packing algorithm and show that the proposed greedy algorithm can effectively be used to schedule the load in Home Energy Management (HEM) system as well as in small offices without much overhead.