Online scheduling for electricity cost in smart grid

Abstract

This paper studies an online scheduling problem in the smart grid, which is arised in demand response management under the scenario with real-time communication between the grid operator and consumers. Consumers send the power requests online over-list. The request is released with a limited set of timeslots. Only one of the timeslots in the set can this request be served by the operator. In a timeslot, the electricity cost consumed to serve the requests is a quadratic function of the load in it. Our aim is to find a best possible online schedule which generates the minimal total electricity cost. In this paper, we propose a greedy algorithm of this problem which is 2-competitive. Besides, we prove our algorithm is optimal.