Optimal residential appliance scheduling under dynamic pricing scheme via HEMDAS

With the emergence of smart grid which has advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and microgrid running as a local energy provider for dwellings through distributed energy resources (DERs), dwellers have the opportunity to schedule their in-home energy usage by themselves to reduce energy expense. Household tasks along with DER operation are scheduled according to electricity real-time price (RTP) and natural gas fixed price. Various studies have shown that the lack of effective home automation systems and the lack of awareness among users to respond to time-varying prices are two chief obstacles in order to fully exploit the potential benefits of dynamic pricing schemes. This paper drives to handle these problems by proposing an automatic and optimal residential energy consumption scheduling technique which tries to achieve a favorable trade-off between minimizing the energy costs as well as the inconvenience for the operation of both electrical and thermal in a smart home environment. Simulation results show that the proposed scheduling method leads to significant reduction in energy costs for diverse load scenarios with the electricity demand from the grid. Therefore, the deployment of the proposed method is advantageous for both users and utilities. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.