Heuristics for home appliances scheduling problems with energy consumption bounds

In this paper we consider the problem of scheduling two types of home appliances: ones with fixed power and flexible operation time and others with fixed operation time and flexible power. We consider energy consumption bounds that depend on the time of the day, which modify considerably the computational complexity of the appliance scheduling problems. Additionally, we also take into account the possibility that appliances with flexible operation time could be interrupted. The goal of the decision-making process is to minimize the electricity bill paid by the users and the discomfort perceived by them, according to a desired-tradeoff, subject to the operation constraints involved.

Since these problems turn out to be NP-hard, we describe several heuristics we designed, explaining their foundations. Finally, we analyze the computational results obtained for instances we generated and present the best algorithms to employ according to different priorities the users might have.