Heuristics for Home Appliances Scheduling Problems with Energy Consumption Bounds

Many existing papers on the topic of smart grids work on scheduling of appliances considering an unlimited energy supply. However, the size of the power grid necessary to operate on periods of peak demand of the day would be large, and that would not be exploited during most of the day. Because of this, electricity providers could establish energy consumption bounds, which modify considerably appliance scheduling problems. In this paper we formulate a mathematical model for the problems we tackle, which include energy consumption bounds that depend on the time of the day. We prove that these problems are NP-hard and we later describe several heuristics we designed, explaining their foundations. Finally, we analyze the computational results obtained for instances we generated and present the best algorithms to employ according to different priorities the users might have