A Communication-Based Appliance Scheduling Scheme for Consumer-Premise Energy Management Systems

In this paper, a communication-based load scheduling protocol is proposed for in-home appliances connected over a home area network. Specifically, a joint access and scheduling approach for appliances is developed to enable in-home appliances to coordinate power usage so that the total energy demand for the home is kept below a target value. The proposed protocol considers both “schedulable” appliances which have delay flexibility, and “critical” appliances which consume power as they desire. An optimization problem is formulated for the energy management controller to decide the target values for each time slot, by incorporating the variation of electricity prices and distributed wind power uncertainty. We model the evolution of the protocol as a two-dimensional Markov chain, and derive the steady-state distribution, by which the average delay of an appliance is then obtained. Simulation results verify the analysis and show cost saving to customers using the proposed scheme.