Fair Billing Mechanism for Energy Consumption Scheduling with User Deviation in the Smart Grid

In the future smart grid, Demand Side Management (DSM) will be one of the key technologies to facilitate utility companies and customers in order to achieve system optimality such as minimizing energy cost and peak-to-average ratio. While most of the prior works in the literature have reported good results in achieving system optimality, they mostly ignore considering the aspect of system fairness, especially in regards to the electricity bills of the users. More specifically previous works do not address the important problem of users' commitment and their actual consumption level when calculating the payments. In this paper, we tackle this problem and design an alternative fair billing mechanism that assures the system fairness. The proposed billing considers not only real-time consumption information of the grid but also the energy consumption level of each user. Thus, each user's bill will be adjusted based on their commitment and contribution to the system. Simulation results show that the proposed billing mechanism ensures fairness in users' payments.