Near Optimal Demand-Side Energy Management Under Real-Time Demand-Response Pricing

In this paper, the authors present demand-side energy management under real-time demand-response pricing as a task scheduling problem which is NP-hard. Using minmax as the objective, they show that the schedule produced by their minmax scheduling algorithm has a number of salient advantages: significant peakshaving, cost reduction, and risk-aversion for the consumers. They prove that their algorithm finds near-optimal solutions and their simulation study show that the actual performance is better than the worst-case bound. The algorithm is simple to implement and efficient at the scale of large enterprises.