Power scheduling for programmable appliances in Microgrids

Recent advances in computing and communication enable the concept of smart homes that contain programmable appliances. Knowing that most household tasks do not need to be performed at specific times, but rather within a preferred time period, this paper studies the problem of optimal power generation scheduling in an isolated Microgrid, exploiting the flexibility to schedule energy-consuming tasks in smart homes. We formulate the problem as a non-linear optimization problem and present two scheduling protocols to solve it: GA-INT, a genetic algorithm that utilizes task interruptions, and PRO-S, a heuristic-based algorithm, which strives to smooth out peaks in the load profile. Numerical simulations demonstrate that PRO-S successfully reduces the complexity of the problem, while guaranteeing performance that approximates GA-INT's. The latter returns optimal or nearly optimal solutions, but with long execution times.