Deferrable Load Scheduling under Demand Charge: A Block Model-Predictive Control Approach (2012.14624v2)

Abstract: Optimal scheduling of deferrable electrical loads can reshape the aggregated load profile to achieve higher operational efficiency and reliability. This paper studies deferrable load scheduling under demand charge that imposes a penalty on the peak consumption over a billing period. Such a terminal cost poses challenges in real-time dispatch when demand forecasts are inaccurate. A block model-predictive control approach is proposed by breaking demand charge into a sequence of stage costs. The problem of charging electric vehicles is used to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed approach. Numerical examples show that the block model-predictive control outperforms benchmark methods in various settings.