User-Centric Consumption Scheduling and Fair Billing Mechanism in Demand-Side Management

In the smart grid, residential consumption scheduling in demand-side management (DSM) is one of the key technologies to facilitate utility companies and users in order to achieve systems optimality such as minimizing energy cost and demand peak. The success of DSM implementation depends on the level of user participation. While most of the prior works on DSM have reported good optimal results, they show a lack of focus towards user-centric issues such as user preferences, consumption deviation, and system fairness. Failure to account for such issues may lead to lower user participation in DSM programs. To address this problem, we propose user-centric consumption scheduling and fair billing mechanism for DSM program which consider economic as well as comfort aspects. First, a user's discomfort cost is integrated into price incentives for determining consumption schedules. Second, consumption rescheduling mechanism is designed to allow users to change their preferences if necessary, and request new schedules. Finally, to improve the level of system fairness and avoid strategic players who try to manipulate the consumption profile for their benefit, a fair billing mechanism is proposed at the end of the scheduling period which takes into account both rescheduling users and user's consumption deviation level. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of energy cost saving and improving fairness in the user's billing.