Stigmergy-Based Scheduling of Flexible Loads

In this paper, we address the rescheduling of shiftable loads in a sub-section of the power grid (micro-grid) to maximize the utilization of renewable energy sources (RES). The objective is to achieve a schedule for all customers in the micro-grid such that the RES output utilization is maximized. Customers correspond to residential households provided with intelligent appliances with the ability to recalculate their operation times. We propose an approach based on stigmergy to efficiently find a close-to-optimal solution to the general problem. An empirical analysis of the internal functioning of the algorithm is performed. Furthermore, the performance of the algorithm is compared to a price-based approach.