PNNL

Abstract

This paper presents a novel appliance commitment algorithm that schedules thermostatically-controlled household loads based on price and consumption forecasts considering users’ comfort settings to meet an optimization objective such as minimum payment or maximum comfort. The formulation of an appliance commitment problem was described in the paper using an electrical water heater load as an example. The thermal dynamics of heating and coasting of the water heater load was modeled by physical models; random hot water consumption was modeled with statistical methods. The models were used to predict the appliance operation over the scheduling time horizon. User comfort was transformed to a set of linear constraints. Then, a novel linear, sequential, optimization process was used to solve the appliance commitment problem. The simulation results demonstrate that the algorithm is fast, robust, and flexible. The algorithm can be used in home/building energy-management systems to help household owners or building managers to automatically create optimal load operation schedules based on different cost and comfort settings and compare cost/benefits among schedules.