A Greedy algorithm for local heating

Abstract: This paper studies a planning problem for supplying hot water in domestic environment. Hereby, boilers (e.g. gas or electric boilers, heat pumps or microCHPs) are used to heat water and store it for domestic demands. We consider a simple boiler which is either turned on or turned off and is connected to a buffer of limited capacity. The energy needed to run the boiler has to be bought e.g. on a day-ahead market, so we are interested in a planning which minimizes the cost to supply the boiler with energy in order to fulfill the given heat demand. We present a greedy algorithm for this heating problem whose time complexity is O(T {\alpha}(T )) where T is the number of time intervals and {\alpha} is the inverse of Ackermann function.