Peak Load Appliance Scheduling for
Demand-Side Management in the Future Smart Grids
Hossein Barghi Jond, Rıfat Benveniste
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Avrasya University
Trabzon, Turkey
{hossein, rifat.benveniste}@avrasya.edu.tr
Abstract—In this paper we propose a household appliance
scheduling scheme for smart meters that will be used in future
smart grids. Demand-side management in smart grids is dealing
with the problem of peak load that refers to peak demand of
customers in certain hourly periods. Equalizing peak load hours
to less load hours can address the problem. We propose a
central appliance scheduling unit that it is connected to smart
meters inside the buildings. This central unit do daily/weekly
appliance scheduling of flats based on received electricity prices
from utility company. Based on this firmware kits, peak load
hours will be equalized to non-peak load hours as well as
customers will have less bill payments. Simulation results verify
the proposed algorithm's efficiency in order to address peak
load problem.
Index Terms-- appliance scheduling; demand-side management;
peak load; smart grid; smart meter
I. INTRODUCTION
In future of smart grids, houses are also getting smart and
equipping by interconnected LAN devices. A smart house has
digital and intelligent household appliances. Appliances can
be categorized as non-shiftable and shiftable on electricity
usage period. Non-shiftable appliances such as lighting and
refrigerators cannot be time shifted because they should be
kept on in user demands. Shiftable appliances such as washing
machine working time can be shifted to the hours which
electricity utility company offers. Utility companies encounter
with the peak demand problem in which customer
consumption of electricity is higher inside certain hourly
periods. Therefore, the company has to increase power energy
amount supplying in network by using more resources and
then offer electricity with higher price with respect to non-
peak demand periods. In response, each customer is interested
to have less bill payments. Thus, if there is an intelligent
control unit in each customer's house for scheduling appliance
to cheaper peak periods, there will be a mutual contentment
between customer and company.
Appliance scheduling optimization is an interesting issue
in smart grid Demand-Side Management (DSM) design.
Equipping smart meters with EEC (Energy Consumption
Vasif V. Nabiyev
Department of Computer Engineering
Karadeniz Technical University
Trabzon, Turkey
vasif@ktu.edu.tr
Controlling) unit are proposed by Mahmood et al. [1]. EEC
unit is responsible to scheduling household appliances with
aiming minimizing consumption cost and diminishing in peak
load. A comparing study of two different methodologies of
auction and ILP (Integer Linear Programming) considering
communication and gird constraints is derived by Molderink
et al. [2]. A scheme comprising three unit of admission
control, load balancing and demand response management is
proposed for smart building by Costanzo et al. [3]. This
scheme facilitates integration of energy sources, maintenance
and upgrading. A power consumption scheduler design is
illustrated in [4] where the implemented scheduling procedure
reduce peak load. In [5], appliance scheduling using an
approximate greedy iterative algorithm is proposed, in order to
minimize energy consumption cost. The used cost function
includes a term to model great variations in the scheduling
inside of iterations. A scheduler for shiftable appliances is
presented in [6] where the mechanism runs under each user
identified constraints as well as through information sharing
with neighboring households to rectify the peak load. In [7], a
model for DSM considering user comfort called user-friendly
DSM (UDSM) is demonstrated where the main goal is
minimizing bill, shifting peak load to non-peak loads hours
and usage pattern. DSM systems are explained in [8]. Besides
of classical approaches for analyzing DSM, game theory is an
important mathematical tool that is appropriate for DSM
problems. Pricing of electricity load in utility company side
and scheduling of appliances in customer side can be a market
problem where the interactions between the utility company
and customers can be handling inside a game class. Game
theory based DSM models are interested in smart grid society
such as in [9]-[11].
In this paper we address following DSM problem. Assume
that in future smart grids, all building has a part called Central
Scheduling Unit (CSU). All customers in flats installed digital
smart meter that is equipped with a digital and programmable
control unit. The flat smart meter has communications with
the CSU and vice versa. The intelligent appliances inside the
flat also connected to the CSU through the Smart Meter
Control Unit (SMCU). CSU can communicate with electricity
utility company to get electricity price table of the day/week.
User determines which appliance in the flat will be entered to
the CSU scheduling queue through flat's SMCU. Thus, the
CSU is responsible of the appliance scheduling task. CSU Flat 1 Appliance
announces scheduling to flat smart meters. Each SMCU sends 1

on/off signal to the appliances based on received schedule Flat 2

table from CSU. In this paper we formulated the electricity Appliance
2
consumption scheduling problem aiming to minimize the Flat's
payment of bills as well as equalizing peak load to less load CSU SMCU
hours.
Flat N Appliance
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II A
describes how the optimization problem is formulated and Utility
then, solution approach, simulation results and discussions are Company
given in Section III. Section IV concludes.

II. PROBLEM FORMULATION Figure 1. An assumed demand side management system.

Consider a demand-side management scheme, where a
specified number of customers inside a building are connected Assume An A , then payment bill optimization problem
to the building CSU such that the CSU is also connected to the (for a building's users) for this type of appliances can be
utility company as is shown in Fig.1. CSU receives the utility modelled as follows [1], [9], [10],
company price strategy as well as appliance scheduling
requests from flat smart meters. Then, CSU do daily/weekly N A

scheduling considering user demands as well as utility min ¦¦ pTn ,acn ,a (2)
n 1 a 1
company desires where users aim to consume cheaper
electricity and utility company aims to mitigate peak load s.t.
hours. We formulate this model as below. En ,a

Let p h represents the electricity price at hour h and H ¦c

h D n ,a
h
n ,a En , a , a  An , h  ‚n ,a

represents the scheduling time window. Also let that p min

The above constrained problem minimizes the peak load in
and p max are the minimum and maximum prices that utility peak hours and reduces the energy consumption cost. The
company can offer to the customers, respectively. Thus, we constraint satisfies the energy need of each appliance and user
assume p min d p h d p max . Assume we have a set of customers demands of working appliances in a specified time interval.
denoted by  , where  N . For each customer n  ^1,..,N ` , III. PROBLEM SOLVING AND SIMULATIONS
we define the set of shiftable appliances in each household An
A. Scheduling Algorithm
which consume same amount of energy per hour.
To solve constrained optimization problem of eq. (2), we
For each hour h  ‚ , ‚ ^1,2,..,H ` and each proposed a scheduling algorithm as it is presented in Fig.2.
appliance a  An , we define power consumption scheduling This algorithm can be expressed as bellow:
vector, cTn,a >c Dn ,a
n,a
,..,cnh,a ,..,cn ,a
En ,a
@ where D n,a and E n,a are the 1: Each user enters three values in hours to define scheduling
interval and whole operation period for each appliance.
customer defined scheduling interval such that D n ,a d E n ,a . SMCU may receive these values and by provided keyboard on
Also, cnh,a is 0 or 1 and represents the nth user's power the smart meter or even from internet or LAN.
consumption hour of appliance a at time h such that 1 shows 2: Each user's SMCU transmits entered data to the building
consumption and 0 shows vice versa. We have price CSU through LAN connection.
scheduling vector pTn,a
D
>
p ,.., p h ,.., p
E
such that price
n,a n ,a
@ 3: CSU connects to the utility company through internet to get
between scheduling interval D n,a and E n,a are picked up from update prices of electricity.
the general price scheduling vector containing prices for all 4: CSU creates the price scheduling vector for all appliances
hours h  ‚ . that are entered to the scheduling queue.
Total electricity consumption in the whole operation 5: CSU creates an initial scheduling table (matric) where the
period of appliance a  An is defined with En ,a as below, columns are the hours and the rows are the appliances.
En ,a 6: For all appliances CSU assigns cheapest hours from price
¦c
h Dn ,a
h
n ,a En ,a (1) scheduling vector considering the whole operation period.
7: CSU equalizes the same price intervals elements of the a  An User n enters D n,a , E n,a , En,a 
created matric because energy consumption distribute to all
hours of day.
8: For all appliances CSU creates power consumption n  Smart meter sends data to the CSU
scheduling vector.
9: CSU announces each user appliance scheduling table (as a CSU asks prices from utility company
sub-table of main scheduling table) to their flat's SMCU.
10: Based on each flat's appliance scheduling table, SMCU
sends on/off signals to the device thought communication a  An CSU creates p Tn,a
channels.
Histogram equalization operations may be used in the
equalizing same price intervals elements in step 7 of the CSU create scheduling random
algorithm. Histogram equalization is a useful image N

processing technique to enhance contrast. Detailed discussion table (matric) of ¦A

n 1
n uH
is provided in [12]. Just here we should notice that the
histogram equalization algorithm should be modified to keep
the hours inside a value in connected state. Herein below, we a  An CSU assigns cheapest
present a study case of a DSM appliance scheduling problem. T
within E n ,a from p n,a
B. Study Case
Assume a very small building with N 3 . Users CSU equalizes loads in same price
n 1,2,3 has of shiftable appliances A1 ^a11, a12 , a13` , intervals of matric

A2 ^a21, a22 , a23, a24 , a25`, A3 ^a31, a32, a33, a34` , respectively.
The appliances are illustrated with their whole operation a  An CSU creates cTn,a
period in Table I. Also, assume that the utility company
announces electricity price for each hour of a typical day as it
is presented in Fig. 3. Then, bill optimization or minimum n  CSU announces scheduling of An
energy consumption problem, for this case can be presented as
below,
§ 3 5 4
· a  An Based on cTn,a the smart
min¨ ¦ pTa c a  ¦ pTa c a  ¦ pTa c a ¸ (3)
©a1 a 1 a 1 ¹ meter sends on/off to the device

s.t.
Figure 2. Proposed scheduling algorithm for CSU in future smart meters.
7 12 14

¦c
h 24
h
1,1 5, ¦c
h 22
h
1, 2 3, ¦c
h 10
h
1, 3 2,

24 10 7 17 12

¦c
h 17
h
2 ,1 4 , ¦ c 2h, 2
h 7
1 , ¦ c h2,3
h 24
3 , ¦ c 2h, 4
h 10
5, ¦c
h 8
h
2,5 1, TABLE I. SOME ASSUMED SHIFTABLE APPILIANCES

User a En,a αn,a βn,a

14 14 7 24

¦c
h 9
h
3,1 1, ¦c
h 10
h
3, 2 4, ¦c
h 24
h
3, 3 5, ¦c
h 17
h
3, 4 1
n=1
a11
a12
5:00
3:00
24:00
22:00
07:00
12:00
a13 2:00 10:00 14:00
Optimization problem expressed in eq. (3) is solved by
proposed algorithm (in Fig.2). We call the output of proposed a21 4:00 17:00 24:00
algorithm as “optimal scheduling”. Fig. 4 shows the random a22 1:00 07:00 10:00
consumption versus of optimal scheduling. Based on the n=2 a23 3:00 24:00 07:00
results proposed scheduling reduces energy consumption and a24 5:00 10:00 17:00
bill payments to %10 less of random usage. Also, because of a25 1:00 08:00 12:00
using equalization algorithm inside solutions, the peal load a31 1:00 09:00 14:00
hours is mitigated in contrast of random usage. a32 4:00 10:00 14:00
n=3
a33 5:00 24:00 07:00
a34 1:00 17:00 24:00
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IV. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper we have proposed a scheme for appliance
scheduling in buildings for DSM in smart grids. The scheme
will cause decreasing in the payment of bills in user flats. In
addition to, the peak load hours is considered in the scheme to
distributing to the less load hours. The proposed scheme is
containing a Central Scheduling Unit and multiple digital
smart meter equipping control unit. A study case is derived to
show simulation results of proposed scheme where 10% of bill
payment is seen.
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