Harmony Pigeon Inspired Optimization for Appliance Scheduling in Smart Grid

Since the development of Smart Grid (SG), Home Energy Management (HEM) systems are emerged widely into it and consumers have an opportunity to schedule their smart appliances efficiently in smart homes. In this research, meta-heuristic techniques Harmony Search Algorithm (HSA), Pigeon Inspired Optimization (PIO) and our proposed Harmony Pigeon Inspired Optimization (HPIO) are adopted to efficiently schedule smart appliances in smart home. The aim of using the above proposed techniques is to reduce Electricity Cost (EC) and Peak-to-Average Ratio (PAR). HEM is proposed to further evaluate the performance of evaluated techniques. In this work, single home and multiple homes which consist of 10,30 and 50 homes are considered equipped with multiple smart appliances. These appliances are divided into three sets, which are thermostatically and non-thermostatically controllable, and non-controllable appliances under Time-of Use (ToU) pricing scheme. Simulations are carried out on these parameters and results shows that proposed technique HPIO performed better than HSA and PIO in terms of minimizing waiting time and PAR. We have considered User Comfort (UC) in terms of waiting time.