282
1, JANUARY 2014
A Distributed Algorithm of Appliance Scheduling for
Home Energy Management System
Phani Chavali, Student Member, IEEE, Peng Yang, Student Member, IEEE, and Arye Nehorai, Fellow, IEEE
AbstractDemand side management encourages the users in
a smart grid to shift their electricity consumption in response to
varying electricity prices. In this paper, we propose a distributed
framework for the demand response based on cost minimiza-
tion. Each user in the system will find an optimal start time and
operating mode for the appliances in response to the varying
electricity prices. We model the cost function for each user and the
constraints for the appliances. We then propose an approximate
greedy iterative algorithm that can be employed by each user to
schedule appliances. In the proposed algorithm, each user requires
only the knowledge of the price of the electricity, which depends
on the aggregated load of other users, instead of the load profiles
of individual users. In order for the users to coordinate with each
other, we introduce a penalty term in the cost function, which
penalizes large changes in the scheduling between successive iter-
ations. Numerical simulations show that our optimization method
will result in lower cost for the consumers, lower generation
costs for the utility companies, lower peak load, and lower load
fluctuations.
Index TermsAdvanced metering infrastructure, appliance
scheduling, demand response, distributed optimization, time-de-
pendent pricing, Walrasian equilibrium, welfare theorem.
I. INTRODUCTION
T HE IDEA OF A smart electricity system has moved
from conceptual to operational in the last few years. The
smart grid has undergone significant innovation, with demand
response [1], [2] being one of the important focus areas. The
principal goal of demand response is to reduce the generation
cost of electricity by reducing the peak load and shifting peak-
hour demand to off-peak hours. Shifting electricity usage to
off-peak hours is desired to allow for better utilization of the
generated power, and reduce costs to both the consumers and
utility companies [3], [4].
With the advent of advanced communication infrastructures
that enable a reliable two-way communication between the
energy provider and the end-users, it has become feasible for
the utility company to provide the consumers with the time-de-
pendent price of the electricity (both real-time and day-ahead
Manuscript received July 10, 2012; revised January 15, 2013; accepted Oc-
tober 07, 2013. Date of current version December 24, 2013. This work was sup-
ported by the International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sus-
tainability (I-CARES) at Washington University in St. Louis. Paper no. TSG-
00430-2012.
The authors are with the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical and Sys-
tems Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, 63130
USA (e-mail: chavalis@ese.wustl.edu; yangp@ese.wustl.edu).
Corresponding author: A. Nehorai (e-mail: nehorai@ese.wustl.edu).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TSG.2013.2291003
1949-3053 2013 IEEE
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SMART GRID, VOL. 5, NO.
fashion) [5][9]. The consumers will then adjust their load
schedule according to the price. Further, the advanced metering
infrastructure (AMI) [10] has made it possible to collect the
usage data and to communicate with other AMI devices. With
this data, the users can schedule the consumption of electricity
using the energy-management controller (EMC) [6], [11]. A
programmable logic controller (PLC) [12], [13] is then used
which helps implement the proposed demand response algo-
rithm and provides an interface between the appliances, sensors,
and the controller. In addition, PLCs also provide modules
to process signals that have special interfacing requirements
[14]. Several companies developed commercial PLC based
home energy management systems recently, see for example
the products in [15] and [16].
The smart grid research community has been actively
studying the various demand response problems. In [17],
the authors study the energy scheduling problem under the
assumption of known energy consumption for all the appli-
ances; in [18], the authors study energy scheduling under the
assumption of known operating times for all the appliances.
Both works consider a single user scenario in order to find
the optimal energy consumption. In [6], the authors find the
optimal start times of the appliances in a system with multiple
users, under the assumption of a known energy consumption
for all the appliances. With this approach, there is a shift of
peak load, but the peak load itself is not significantly reduced.
In [19], the authors solve a similar problem in a distributed
framework using a stochastic algorithm. They assume that each
appliance has a flexible start time, but a fixed duration and
energy consumption. In contrast, the authors in [11] propose
an energy scheduling scheme where the start time and the end
time are known a priori, and the energy consumption is varied
continuously. They propose a distributed algorithm to find the
optimal energy consumption schedule using tools from game
theory. In this approach, the users are billed based on their
total daily use of electricity, the distributed optimization is
sequential, all users have to broadcast their schedules to all the
other users in the system, and all the appliances are assumed
to belong to the same class. In [20], the authors propose an
energy consumption scheme by categorizing the appliances
into two classes, and in [21], the authors propose a scheme with
four classes. The appliances are characterized using a utility
function and a set of constraints. However, the operating times
of the appliances are assumed to be known a priori, and that
the energy consumption can be varied continuously.
In this paper, we propose a distributed energy scheduling
algorithm as a demand response for the smart grid. We use
day-ahead pricing scheme, where the price of the electricity for
CHAVALI et al.: A DISTRIBUTED ALGORITHM OF APPLIANCE SCHEDULING FOR HOME ENERGY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM 283

Fig. 1. Power, control, and information flows among users and the utility company.

the day is determined on the previous day. We then find op- is denoted by . The Hadamard product of two matrices,
timal operating times for the electric appliances and their corre- and , is denoted as . and denote an identity
sponding energy consumptions by minimizing the overall cost matrix of order and a zero matrix of size , respec-
of operation. Our approach is different from the related work tively, and denotes a vector of ones of size .
in four main aspects: i) we jointly optimize both the start time
and the energy consumption for each appliance of the user; ii) II. SYSTEM MODEL
we bill all the users based on their time-dependent use of elec- We consider a power system with one utility company (we
tricity; iii) we enforce realistic constraints on the operation of refer to the utility company as the utility from now on) and
the appliances by categorizing them into two different classes; users. For each user, an AMI measures the hourly consumption
iv) we let the energy consumption vary in a discrete manner, of electricity and communicates this consumption information
which is more realistic. to the utility. The AMI also communicates the price information
Further, our algorithm is fully distributed, where the only from the utility to the users. A PLC is used to send the control
information available to the users is the prices for different signals for each appliance depending on the demand response
time-periods. Using this price, each user will find his energy algorithm and for each user, an EMC facilitates the communi-
consumption schedule. Since we allow the energy consumption cation between the appliances and the PLC and schedules the
to vary in a discrete fashion, the corresponding optimization the appliances within a home. Fig. 1 illustrates the flow of the
problem will be NP-hard. Therefore, we employ a greedy information and power between various blocks.
iterative algorithm to find the sub-optimal energy consumption A. Model of Users
schedule of each user. In each iteration, all the users will
communicate their energy consumption schedule to the utility We divide a day into time periods, denoted as
and consider that there is a set of
company. The utility company will then adjust the price de-
different appliances, denoted as . Each user
pending on the overall system load and broadcast the price to
has a multiset1 of the appliances chosen from the set , and
all the users. The users will then update their energy consump-
. In order to simplify the notation for the subsequent
tion based on the new price. These iterations continue until
discussion, we assume from now that 2. Each
convergence. We use numerical simulations to show that the
appliance contributes to either a base load or a schedulable
proposed algorithm will result in lower cost for the consumers,
load. The base load corresponds to electricity needed to satisfy
higher profit for the utility companies, lower peak load, and
basic user needs. Tasks such as basic refrigeration, heating and
lower load variance.
lighting correspond to base load. The schedulable load corre-
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section II
sponds to appliances with flexible start time, and flexible mode
we introduce the system model, where we describe the model
of operation. Appliances such as dishwasher, washer-dryers,
for the users, model for the appliances, and the pricing strategy. PHEVs, etc., contribute to the schedulable load.
We also formulate the problem of appliance scheduling as a cen- The total load of the user at time , is given as
tralized optimization problem. In Section III, we propose a dis-
tributed framework to solve the optimization problem, where (1)
each user employs a greedy approach. We provide numerical
simulations in Section IV, and conclude the paper in Section V.
Notations:We use the following notation in the paper. We de- where is the base load, is the schedulable load,
note vectors by boldface lowercase letters, e.g., , and matrices and correspond to the set of base load appliances and
by boldface uppercase letters, e.g., . For a matrix , we use 1In mathematics, the notion of a multiset (or bag) is a generalization of the
to represent the column of , and use to represent notion of set in which members are allowed to appear more than once.
the element in the row and the column. , and 2Note that his assumption is made only to simplify the notation, and the al-

denote the transpose, conjugate transpose, and vector gorithm can be easily extended to the case where different users have different
appliances. In the numerical simulations section, we consider that different users
form of the matrix , respectively. The element of a vector have a different set of appliances.
284 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SMART GRID, VOL. 5, NO. 1, JANUARY 2014

schedulable load appliances, respectively. In general, the vectors of all the users and the price will be in an equilibrium
energy consumption vector of the schedulable appliance of (see Section III for a detailed description).
the user, , is a bounded contin- We assume that the load balance constraint is satisfied, and
uous variable. However, in practical scenarios, it is not possible hence the total generation is given as
to change the energy consumption of an appliance in a contin-
uous fashion. Therefore, we consider a more realistic model,
(6)
where each appliance can operate in one of the several possible
modes. Each mode corresponds to a particular energy consump-
tion, and the appliances can switch from one mode to the other. We model the generation cost to be a non-decreasing
Thus, in this model, the energy consumption vector takes only convex quadratic function of the the total generation, :
a finite set of values. Let the appliance, for , have
operating modes denoted as . For the (7)
appliance, we define a energy consumption vector,
which specifies the energy consumed by the appliance in each where and are constants. Such quadratic models are also
mode, as used in [22][25].

C. Model of Appliances
In this section, we describe the models of the schedulable
Again, to simplify the notation for the subsequent discussion,
electric appliances that are commonly used in the households.
we assume that all the appliances have a same number of oper-
Our modeling of electric appliances was motivated by the smart
ating modes, i.e, . The optimization framework
appliance catalog in [26] and smart appliances survey report in
presented below can easily be extended to the case where dif-
[27]. Following these references, we broadly separate the elec-
ferent appliances have different modes3. Thus
tric appliances into two types, where each type is characterized
by a set of constraints on the scheduling vector .
1) Type I: If any appliance belonging to the first type is
switched ON at time , it has to remain ON until the task is
(2)
finished. This constraint is usually called the hold-time con-
The schedulable load profile matrix of the user is ob-
straint [28]. In this paper we enforce the hold-time constraint
tained by concatenating the vectors , for , i.e.,
using the following equation:
. Note that the dimension of is .
For the schedulable appliance of the user, we also (8)
define a binary matrix of size , such that
(9)
if and only if the appliance is
scheduled to operate in mode (3)
at time with representing a column vector of zeros of appropriate di-
otherwise. mension. The matrix multiplication results in a
binary column vector with the non-zero locations representing
Given this choice, the load vector, , can be expressed as a the times when the appliance is operating in one of the modes.
function of the using By pre-multiplying this vector with the shift operator matrix
(4) we move up the original column vector by one location. The
difference between this vector, and the original column vector
The user has the flexibility to choose the operating mode and should have exactly 2 non-zero elements if the schedule matrix
time of the appliances. We wish to find an optimal for has continual operating times. Equation (8) represents this
and for that minimizes the total cost to argument.
the users. In addition to the hold-time constraint, all the appliances that
belong to type I must finish their respective tasks before the
B. Energy Price end of the day. Thus, the cumulative energy consumption of
In this paper, we set the time-dependent unit retail price of the appliance must exceed a minimum energy threshold before
electricity to be proportional to the first order derivative of the the end of the day. In most of the practical scenarios, this min-
time-dependent generation cost, imum energy is proportional to the time of operation of the ap-
pliance. Hence, we choose the minimum energy threshold to be
(5) , where is a constant that depends on
the appliance type and the user, counts the number of
where is the price of electricity at time in cents; , time intervals in which the appliance is operating, and is a
which is a function of , is the generation cost to the utility; proportionality constant. With this choice the minimum energy
is the total generation of the utility at time ; and constraint is mathematically expressed as
is a preset profit coefficient. This choice ensures that the load
3We consider different appliances have different number of operating modes
in the numerical example. (10)
CHAVALI et al.: A DISTRIBUTED ALGORITHM OF APPLIANCE SCHEDULING FOR HOME ENERGY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM 285

Appliances such as washer-dryer, dishwasher, etc. belong to this cost, respectively. The user satisfaction costs corresponding
type. to changing the operating mode and the operating time should
2) Type II: Appliances that fall into the second type do not satisfy the following properties:
follow the hold-time constraint. For these appliances, the times 1) The user satisfaction due to the change in the operating
during which the device is turned ON need not be continual. mode and time of an appliances should enforce a high cost
However, the devices should finish the task before a specified when the actual mode and time of operation are different
end time, which can be expressed mathematically as from the user preferred operation mode and cost.
2) The satisfaction due to the change in the operating mode
(11) and time should be asymmetric around the ideal operating
time and the mode, respectively. This asymmetry models
where is the specified end time of the appliance of the the fact that the satisfaction the user obtains if his appli-
user, and is a matrix formed by taking ance is scheduled to operate one mode higher is not the
the first rows of . Appliances such as PHEV, electric same as the dissatisfaction incurred if the same appliance is
chargers, and power inverters fall under this type. scheduled to operate mode lower, and in the same manner
In addition, both type I and type II appliances should operate models the fact that the satisfaction when an appliance is
in exactly one mode at any given time. This constraint is en- advanced by certain time is not the same as the dissatisfac-
forced using: tion when the same appliance is delayed by the same time.
In this paper, we quantify the satisfaction cost of the users due
(12) to operating mode mismatch using an exponential cost:

(16)
D. Optimization Problem
In this section, we formulate the problem of appliance sched- where is the ideal operating mode of the appliance of
uling as an optimization problem. In addition to considering the the user, and are constants specifying the how
total bill that users pay for their energy consumption, we also quickly the user gets dissatisfied as he moves away from the
consider the user preference in terms of their ideal start times ideal mode. Note that the cost is asymmetric around the ideal op-
and ideal operating modes in the optimization objective. Given erating mode. The reason for choosing the exponential cost is to
complete knowledge about user preferences, we find the optimal satisfy the first property above that imposes high cost when the
scheduling by minimizing the global cost function: operating mode deviates from the ideal mode. Since the number
of modes is in general small, using an exponential function im-
poses high cost.
The third part of the overall cost is the satisfaction cost due
to delaying or advancing the operation of an appliance, and we
quantify this satisfaction using

(17)

(13) where is the ideal start time of the appliance of the

user, and are constants specifying how quickly the
In the above optimization problem, denotes the cost user gets dissatisfied by advancing or delaying the operation
incurred by the appliance of the user for using it in the of the appliance. Similar to , we consider exponential
mode at time . The cost for each user comprises cost, and model it to be asymmetric around the ideal operating
three parts, i.e., time. In general, the cost can be replaced by a weighted
combination of the individual costs when the preference of the
(14) users for these various costs is different, i.e.,
The first part of the cost is the actual dollar amount the user
pays to the utility for using the electricity. This cost for the (18)
appliance of the user is given as
where and are the weights assigned to the cost
(15) functions for each user, such that . For
example, for the users who are more sensitive to the money they
Note that the cost matrix depends on the price vector pay to the utility, is greater than or .
, and hence on scheduling variables Solving the centralized optimization problem in (13) requires
of all the users and all the appliances through (1), (4), (5) and detailed information about user specifications and preferences,
(6). which is difficult to achieve in practice. Further the problem is
The choice of the user in selecting the operating mode and non-convex since the cost term depends on scheduling ma-
operating time for each appliance will result in satisfaction trices of all the users. In the next subsection, we propose a greedy
costs which forms the second and the third part of the overall distributed algorithm to find a sub-optimal solution to (13).
286
III. DISTRIBUTED OPTIMIZATION FOR LOAD SCHEDULING
In this section, we propose our distributed framework to solve
the optimization problem described by (13). The idea of the dis-
tributed optimization is to allow users to individually minimize
their own costs, which in turn reduces the global cost of the
system and maximizes the social welfare. The strategy that the
utility company uses is to set the prices of the electricity that
will force the users to choose the load schedules which will min-
imize their individual cost as well as the overall global cost. In
this manner, the price is used as an invisible hand to coordinate
the interaction between the users and the utility.
Our approach for a distributed framework is inspired by the
Walrasian equilibrium theory [29], [30]. A Walrasian equilib-
rium is defined as the tuple of the price and the
user load profile matrices such that at price mini-
mizes both the user cost and the utility cost defined in (7), under
the load balance constraint given in (6).
The key result of the Walrasian equilibrium theory is the fun-
damental first welfare theorem [30] stated below: First Fun-
demental Welfare Theorem: If the tuple of the
price and the user load profile matrices form a Walrasian equi-
librium, then the load profile matrices are Pareto-op-
timal.
The implication of the welfare theorem is that when the users
independently update their schedules such that
are at an equilibrium, then none of the users will have any in-
centive to deviate from their respective schedules. Following
Theorem 2 of [21], it can be seen that at the equilibrium, the
price vector takes the form:
(19)
which is same as our pricing model in (5), which justifies our
choice of the pricing model. Hence when the users indepen-
dently minimizes their own cost by selecting the price to be
proportional marginal generation cost4, the corresponding tu-
ples will be in an equilibrium, and hence mini-
mize the cost to the utility company.
This result motivates our distributed algorithm where the
utility company and the customers jointly compute an equi-
librium in an iterative manner. The user load profiles are all
initialized according to their ideal start times and operating
modes. Then, at the iteration:
The utility company sets the prices to be the marginal costs
using (5) and (6), and broadcasts the price.
The user solves local optimization prob-
lems corresponding to all schedulable appliances , for
, in response to the prices. The optimal
scheduling matrix for the appliance of the user is
obtained by solving:
(20)
4In economics, marginal cost is defined as the change in total cost that arises
when the quantity produced changes by one unit.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SMART GRID, VOL. 5, NO. 1, JANUARY 2014
Note that the cost is fixed and known to each user,
since the price has been announced by the utility company.
The user transmits his updated load profile to the utility.
These iterations continue until convergence, and stop when
the change of user load schedule in consecutive iterations is
within a (small) preset threshold. The proposed algorithm is im-
plemented at beginning of each day. The beginning of the day
can be arbitrary. In this paper, we chose to be the
beginning of the day. In this manner the price acts as an invisible
hand to decouple the central optimization problem into several
optimization problems. These optimization problems that cor-
respond to different users can be solved in a parallel and a dis-
tributed manner.
In order to coordinate the behavior among multiple users and
to ensure that above algorithm converges, we modify the cost by
imposing an additional penalty term. The use of such a penalty
term was first proposed in [31] for tensor field estimation, and
later used in [32] for demand response in smart grids with dis-
tributed generators. In both papers, the penalty term was the dif-
ference between successive iterates of the variable of interest.
Motivated by these ideas, we introduce a penalty on a change
of load schedule between two consecutive iterations for each
user. However, since we are optimizing over binary matrices,
the difference in the successive iterates of these matrices does
not necessarily imply small changes in the load schedules be-
tween iterations. To alleviate this issue, we modify the cost
at the iteration by adding an addition term:
(21)
where is a penalty coefficient, and
(22)
with and are defined as
(23)
Intuitively, the purpose of the penalty term is to penalize the
large changes in the scheduling matrix between successive iter-
ations. The selection of the penalty term determines the conver-
gence of the algorithm. In this paper, we chose the penalty term
to satisfy two requirements. First, we require significant changes
in the user schedules in the beginning of the algorithm, but we
want these changes to become smaller with iterations. Therefore
we require penalty term be small in the beginning but increase
with the iterations, and hence we chose the penalty coefficient
to be proportional to the iteration index. Second, we want users
with high cost to make large changes in their schedules, and
users with small cost to make small changes. This is because
users with high cost have a higher impact on the price and hence
they should be allowed to schedule their usage without signif-
icant constraints. Thus, we choose the penalty coefficient to be
CHAVALI et al.: A DISTRIBUTED ALGORITHM OF APPLIANCE SCHEDULING FOR HOME ENERGY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM 287

inversely proportional to the cost of the users. We choose the TABLE I

penalty coefficient to be GREEDY ALGORITHM FOR INDIVIDUAL USER OPTIMIZATION

(24)

Note that large strictly limits the step size, which slows
down the convergence and small would not guarantee the
convergence of the distributed optimization.
Each user solves constrained local optimization problems
defined as

(25)

using the greedy algorithm described in the next subsection.

After the users solve their respective optimization problems and
find their scheduling matrices for all appliances, they compute
the total load and report it to the utility. Thus, each user only
reports his load profile to the utility instead of broadcasting it to
all other users. Further, in order to find the scheduling matrices,
each user needs only the price from the utility. In this manner
each user only communicates with the utility and no other user
in the network, which provides a greater user privacy.

A. Greedy Algorithm
Solving the individual user optimization (25) is NP-hard [33],
and to obtain an approximate solution, we employ a greedy pro-
gramming approach. Each user finds the scheduling matrix by
selecting the best time and mode to operate his appliances. For
each user, let denote a cost density, defined as
(26)
If is a type I device, the user chooses a pair that mini-
mizes , sets , and marks the time as op-
erating time. Then, for all the subsequent steps the user selects a
time slot and a mode that minimize with an additional
constraint that the chosen time should be adjacent to one of
the operating times (already chosen). This process repeats until
the total operating energy the the appliance is above the min-
imum operating energy. Note that if the cost densities are
convex, then the above algorithm results in an optimal solution.
For the scheduling problem in the paper, the cost densities are
not convex, and hence the resulting solution is suboptimal. For a
type II device, the user selects a time and a mode corresponding
to the minimum value of , sets , and re-
peats this procedure in the subsequent steps until the minimum
energy criterion is satisfied. Note that for the subsequent steps,
there is no additional constraint that the selected time should
be adjacent to the operating times. The cost corresponding to
the solution obtained in this manner is then compared with the
cost corresponding to a solution (if exists) in which the device
operating at only one time (slot) satisfies the minimum energy
constraint. Of these two solutions, we pick the one with the min-
imum cost. We remark here that for the type II appliances, the
problem of energy scheduling is similar to the minimum knap-
sack problem [34], and our proposed greedy algorithm is sim-
ilar to the greedy solution proposed to the minimum knapsack
problem in [35]. It was shown that cost obtained using this algo-
rithm is at most twice as the optimal cost [35], [36] (worst-case
performance bound). The algorithm is summarized in Table I.
Note that contains the set of ordered pairs of operating times
and modes.
IV. NUMERICAL EXAMPLES
A. General Setup
In this section, we describe the general setup for the numer-
ical simulations. We considered a power system with one utility
company, and 100 users . We divided a day into 24
time-periods, labeled as . There were ten
appliance types , that included base load as well as
schedulable load. Each device had a specific operating charac-
teristics that are summarized in Table II. For example, the first
appliance which is a type I non-schedulable appliance with one
operating mode, that consumes 1.32kWh of energy each hour
corresponds to a refrigerator. Similarly the characteristics of the
third appliance correspond a washer-dryer that is schedulable.
These appliance characteristics were taken from the smart appli-
ance report in [27]. For each user, we selected a random number
and types of appliances and the appliance characteristics were
selected according to Table II.
For the generation cost of the utility company, we use
the quadratic function, defined in (7), with parameters
and . The
profit coefficient was selected to be 1.20. For the costs
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TABLE II
CHARACTERISTICS OF VARIOUS APPLIANCES USED IN THE SIMULATION
Fig. 2. Comparison of hourly utility company generation.
, and , we chose and
, respectively. All the appliances
were initialized to start at their ideal start times and operate
in their ideal modes before the beginning of the optimization
algorithm. The iterations of the distributed algorithm were ter-
minated when the change in the user cost between successive
iterations falls below a threshold for all the users. We chose
.
B. Simulation Results
In this section we show results using the setup described in
the previous subsection. We also compare our results with a se-
quential optimization framework in which the users update their
scheduling vectors sequentially. As a result of the sequential up-
dates, there is no need to penalize the cost in this case and hence
the penalty coefficient . Both the sequential
and the distributed optimizations use the algorithm in Table I
to find the optimal schedule of each device. In Fig. 2, we plot
the generation of the utility company before using optimization,
and after using the sequential and the distributed optimizations.
The total daily generation did not change much after optimiza-
tion, but the peak generation significantly dropped, as the users
shifted a part of their on-peak load to off-peak hours. Overall,
the hourly generation was leveled after the optimization. This
leveling benefits the utility because by avoiding using expensive
secondary generators to satisfy peak user load, and the reduced
peak load is beneficial for the stability of the power grid. Fur-
ther, the leveling was much significant after using the sequential
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SMART GRID, VOL. 5, NO. 1, JANUARY 2014
Fig. 3. Cost of the utility as a function of the iteration number.
Fig. 4. Overall user cost as a function of the iteration number.
optimization, but it comes at an additional implementation and
communication overhead as each user has to communicate his
schedule to a centralized processor to update the price.
In Fig. 3, we plot the generation cost of the utility obtained
using the sequential and the distributed optimization methods as
function of the iteration index. As it can be seen, the generation
cost for the utility company decreases with the iteration index.
The overall user cost is plotted in Fig. 4 as a function of the
iteration number. As it can be seen, the cost of all the users de-
creased with the iterations. The algorithm took about 30 itera-
tions to converge.
The daily total daily bill (excluding the satisfaction costs for
the mode and time deviations) for the user (in ) is cal-
culated using the following equation:
(27)
where is the final price after the optimization. We plotted the
daily user bill for the user set in Fig. 5. The results indicate
that the daily total pay for the users decreased. In Fig. 6, we plot
the total cost before and after optimization. As it can be seen,
the total cost decreased after the optimization.
We also mention that for this 100-user system, the number
of iterations for the distributed optimization depended on the
selected . The distributed optimization was done in parallel,
CHAVALI et al.: A DISTRIBUTED ALGORITHM OF APPLIANCE SCHEDULING FOR HOME ENERGY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
vector, which acts as an invisible hand coordinating the inter-
action among the users, and the convergence of the algorithm
is enforced by introducing a penalty term that penalizes large
changes in the user schedule between iterations. Numerical sim-
ulations validate the performance of the proposed algorithm.
Fig. 5. Daily user bill.
Fig. 6. Total cost.
and thus the run time for each iteration is approximately
of that of sequential optimization. The number of iterations for
the distributed case decreased as increased. However, for
a small , the algorithm no longer converges, as every user
tries to schedule the appliance to minimize his own cost, thereby
increasing the overall cost of the electricity due to an aggregated
impact of their personal behavior.
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we propose appliance scheduling as a demand
response scheme for a smart grid. Unlike the earlier approaches
that either select an optimal start time or an optimal energy con-
sumption, our model finds a joint solution by considering all
the appliances to be operating in specific modes. Such mod-
eling is also realistic, since it is easier to design appliances that
can switch between various modes depending on the energy
consumption. We select the optimal price that the utility com-
pany has to charge to be proportional to the generation cost. We
then propose a distributed framework, where each user inde-
pendently minimizes his own cost using a greedy approxima-
tion. The overall optimal behavior is enforced using the price
289
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SMART GRID, VOL. 5, NO. 1, JANUARY 2014
Phani Chavali (S08) received his B.Tech degree in
electronics and communications engineering (with
Honors in signal processing and communications)
from International Institute of Information Tech-
nology-Hyderabad, India in 2007, and his M.S.
degree in electrical engineering from Washington
University in St. Louis (WUSTL), MO, USA in
2010. He is currently working towards the Ph.D.
degree in the electrical and systems engineering from
WUSTL. Prior to joining WUSTL, he was employed
with the Wireless Terminal Division of Samsung
Electronics in Bangalore, India. His research interests are broadly in the
areas of statistical signal processing, radar systems, optimization techniques,
Monte-Carlo methods, learning, and inference algorithms.
Peng Yang (S11) received the B.Sc. degree in elec-
trical engineering from University of Science and
Technology of China in 2009, and M.Sc. degree in
electrical engineering from Washington University
in St. Louis, MO, USA, in 2011. Currently, he is a
Ph.D. degree candidate with the Preston M. Green
Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering
at Washington University in St. Louis, under the
guidance of Dr. Arye Nehorai. His research in-
terests include statistical signal processing, sparse
signal processing, machine learning, smart grid, and
related topics.
Arye Nehorai (S80M83SM90F94) is the
Eugene and Martha Lohman Professor and Chair of
the Preston M. Green Department of Electrical and
Systems Engineering (ESE) at Washington Univer-
sity in St. Louis, MO, USA (WUSTL). Earlier, he
was a faculty member at Yale University and the
University of Illinois at Chicago. He received the
B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the Technion, Israel
and the Ph.D. from Stanford University, California.
Dr. Nehorai served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE
TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING from 2000
to 2002. From 2003 to 2005 he was the Vice President of the IEEE Signal
Processing Society (SPS), the Chair of the Publications Board, and a member
of the Executive Committee of this Society. He was the founding editor of
the special columns on Leadership Reflections in IEEE Signal Processing
Magazine from 2003 to 2006. He has been a Fellow of the IEEE since 1994
and of the Royal Statistical Society since 1996.