Demand response strategy for smart community considering user preferences

Residential users of smart grid have strong flexibility on energy consumption due to the variety of loads. This characteristic is very beneficial for the grid to alleviate peak demand. Smart communities are gaining widespread attention as a new category of residential demand-side entity. In this paper, a demand response strategy is proposed for the smart community, which takes the usage preferences of various users into account. The proposed strategy firstly gets the household optimal demand by maximizing the utility of individual households under the overall community load. Then it defines the preferences of various users in the community as willingness to pay so that the demand can be adaptively adjusted according to the user's willingness to pay and the electricity price. Finally, it adopts DR algorithm with heuristic scheme to schedule users' electricity appliances in the community to curtail users' electricity costs and peak load. Simulations show that the proposed demand response strategy can improve user' individual surplus during peak price hours and result in lower costs for user.