Cooperative Distributed Energy Scheduling of Smart Homes Appliances in a Smart District

This paper deals with the problem of scheduling home appliances energy consumption in a distributed and cooperative framework. We consider a smart district composed by smart buildings network, where each building is controlled by a local controller agent and can include one or more smart homes. The objective of the district is to find a global optimal scheduling of home appliances through the cooperation of the building controller agents aiming at minimizing the total cost, avoiding power peaks, and taking into account the user preferences in terms of appliances' priority of usage. In this context, the day-ahead energy agreement should not be violated to avoid increases of real time energy costs. Furthermore, preliminary formal results on the convergence properties of the distributed approach to validate the performance of the proposed method have been provided in a case study.