Development of two-stage optimization-based demand response technique for smart homes under real-time pricing

Abstract

Residential load management deals with two major objectives viz. minimizing the cost of monthly electricity bill and peak demand of power consumption. Both objectives can be achieved by effective operational scheduling of smart home appliances. These two objectives are conflicting in nature because rescheduling of appliances in order to minimize one objective may result in the rise of another. To achieve both objectives concurrently, an algorithm is suggested in this paper based on artificial intelligent techniques like cuckoo search, hybrid GA-PSO, and adaptive cuckoo search. The proposed algorithm is tested successfully on seven households of different monthly power consumption and real data of dynamic pricing options for electricity applicable in two utilities. To reduce the risk associated with real-time price, a cost function based on inclining block rates (IBR) is also suggested for both the utilities. A novel approach to find the threshold limit of hourly power consumption is also suggested in this paper. The proposed algorithm solves the optimization problem in two stages and validates its performance by successfully achieving both objectives simultaneously.