User Comfort Oriented Residential Power Scheduling in Smart Homes

Smart grid is an emerging technology which is considered as an ultimate solution to meet the increasing power demand challenges. Modern communication technologies has enabled the successful implementation of smart grid, which aims at provision of demand side management mechanisms, such as demand response. In this paper, we propose residential load scheduling model for demand side management. It is assumed that electric prices are announced on day-ahead basis. The major focus of this work is to minimize consumer electricity bill at minimum user discomfort. Load scheduling is formulated as an optimization problem, and an optimal schedule is achieved by solving the minimization problem. Simulation results validate that teacher learning based optimization performs better as compared to genetic algorithm, showing comparable results with linear programming with less computational efforts. TLBO is able to obtain the desired trade-off between consumer electric bill and user discomfort.