Dynamic Appliances Scheduling in Collaborative MicroGrids System

In this paper, a new approach that is based on a collaborative system of MicroGrids (MGs) is proposed to enable household appliance scheduling. To achieve this, appliances are categorized into flexible and non-flexible deferrable loads (DLs), according to their electrical components. We propose a dynamic scheduling algorithm where users can systematically manage the operation of their electric appliances. The main challenge is to develop a flattening function calculus (reshaping) for both flexible and non-flexible DLs. In addition, implementation of the proposed algorithm would require dynamically analyzing two successive multiobjective optimization (MOO) problems. The first one targets the activation schedule of non-flexible DLs and the second one deals with the power profiles of flexible DLs. The MOO problems are resolved by using a fast and elitist multiobjective genetic algorithm (NSGA-II). Finally, in order to show the efficiency of the proposed approach, a case study of a collaborative system that consists of 40 MGs registered in the load curve for the flattening program has been developed. The results verify that the load curve can indeed become very flat by applying the proposed scheduling approach.