Optimal Home Energy Demand Management Based Multi-Criteria Decision Making Methods

From the growth of residential energy demands has emerged new approaches for load scheduling to realize better energy consumption by shifting the required demand in response to cost changes or incentive offers. In this paper, a hybrid method is proposed to optimize the load scheduling problem for cost and energy saving. The method comprises a multi-objective optimization differential evolution (MODE) algorithm to obtain a set of optimal solutions by minimizing the cost and peak of a load simultaneously, as a multi-objective function. Next, an integration of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and a technique for order preferences by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) methods are used as multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods for sorting the optimal solutions' set from the best to the worst, to enable the customer to choose the appropriate schedule time. The solutions are sorted based on the load peak and energy cost as multi-criteria. Data are for ten appliances of a household used for 24 h with a one-minute time slot. The results of the proposed method demonstrate both energy and cost savings of around 47% and 46%, respectively. Furthermore, the results are compared with other recent methods in the literature to show the superiority of the proposed method.