Optimal Meeting Scheduling in Smart Commercial Building for Energy Cost Reduction

In this paper, we consider the optimal meeting scheduling problem in a commercial building over a fixed period of time, with the objectives of minimizing the cost of energy consumption by the air-conditioning system and possibly achieving more balanced power distribution. By considering a set of realistic factors, including the eligible time slots of attendees and energy consumption characteristics of meeting rooms, this problem is formulated as a constrained mixed-integer linear program, which then can be solved by an optimization solver, e.g., CPLEX. However, because the computation complexity increases dramatically with the problem size, a fast heuristic algorithm is proposed. The numerical simulations verify that the heuristic algorithm produces a near-optimal result.