Maximizing Power Factor for Controlling the Load of an Electricity Consumers’ Group by the Second Chance Algorithm

This paper dwells on the issues of improving the switching schedule quality for a group of power consumers when using a pulse-width method of power control. In this regard, the authors comment on a corresponding discrete optimization problem, which is one of the NP-complete problems. They also review the expression for the objective function used to optimize such schedules. The second chance algorithm that the authors offer is based on two algorithms proposed before: the algorithm for finding the initial selection sequence close to an optimum and the selection sequence optimization algorithm based on the simulated annealing and the multi-start method. This algorithm allows finding schedules in polynomial time that are relatively close to optimal schedules in terms of the objective function value. The authors study the influence of various parameters of the second chance algorithm on the average value of the objective function for the resulting schedule. It is experimentally shown that for all 10 used sets of initial data for scheduling, the proposed algorithm is more efficient than previously known algorithms.