Coordination of Home Appliances for Demand Response: An Improved Optimization Model and Approach

Home appliances constitute an interesting source of flexibility for demand response programs. However, their control and coordination are challenging, since typically a high number of such appliances has to be aggregated in order to provide a sufficient amount of flexibility. Thus, an efficient and scalable control approach is required. In a previous work, metaheuristic methods were evaluated for solving a control problem, which considers the regulation and time shifting of home appliances. The present paper presents two extensions of this problem, which consider a higher degree of flexibility, and which increase the practical relevance of the problem. Linear and quadratic formulations of the basic problem and its extensions are provided, which allow the use of mathematical programming for their solution. In experiments, the scalability of the proposed mathematical programming approach is evaluated and the impact of the problem extensions on the resulting schedules is investigated. The results show that problem instances with up to several thousand appliances can efficiently be solved and that aggregators can benefit from the additional flexibility considered in the problem extensions.