Applying limited-preemptive scheduling to peak load reduction in smart buildings

The coordination of appliances in a smart building to limit the peak load is one of the common objectives of power load management approaches such as the Demand-Side Management (DSM). The DSM, in turn, is an important research challenge in the field of smart energy systems and smart grids. This paper investigates the use of the limited-preemption scheduling approach to the coordination of a set of household appliances in a smart building. This approach is enabled by the application of a real-time scheduling framework to manage the activation of electric loads. The limited-preemption technique aims to reduce the number of stop/restart operations applied to interruptible devices, while ensuring the same performance in terms of peak load reduction. The original contribution of this paper w.r.t. to previous works on real-time scheduling with limited-preemption is to present some peculiar issues related to preemptions of electric loads and to assess suitability and benefits of this approach when applied to interruptible household appliances. Simulated results show the effectiveness of this method.