Towards effective and efficient energy management of single home and a smart community exploiting heuristic optimization algorithms with critical peak and real-time pricing tariffs in smart grids ^†

Nowadays, automated appliances are exponentially increasing. Therefore, there is a need for a scheme to accomplish the electricity demand of automated appliances. Recently, many Demand Side Management (DSM) schemes have been explored to alleviate Electricity Cost (EC) and Peak to Average Ratio (PAR). In this paper, energy consumption problem in a residential area is considered. To solve this problem, a heuristic based DSM technique is proposed to minimize EC and PAR with affordable user’s Waiting Time (WT). In heuristic techniques: Bacterial Foraging Optimization Algorithm (BFOA) and Flower Pollination Algorithm (FPA) are implemented. Furthermore, a novel heuristic algorithm has been proposed by merging the best features of the aforementioned existing algorithms. We test the proposed scheme on single homes and on smart community (involving multiple households). Different Operational Time Intervals (OTIs) are also considered for implementation. We have performed simulations for validating the our scheme. Results clearly demonstrate that the proposed Hybrid Bacterial Flower Pollination Algorithm (HBFPA) shows efficacy for EC and for reduction of PAR with reasonable user WT.