Abstract
Households equipped with distributed energy resources, such as storage units and renewables, open the possibility of self-consumption of on-site generation, sell energy to the grid, or do both according to the context of operation. In this paper, a model for optimizing the energy resources of households by an energy service provider is developed. We consider houses equipped with technologies that support the actual reduction of energy bills and therefore perform demand response actions. A mathematical formulation is developed to obtain the optimal scheduling of household devices that minimizes energy bill and demand response curtailment actions. In addition to the scheduling model, the innovative approach in this paper includes evolutionary algorithms used to solve the problem under two optimization approaches: (a) the non-parallel approach combine the variables of all households at once; (b) the parallel-based approach takes advantage of the independence of variables between households using a multi-population mechanism and independent optimizations. Results show that the parallel-based approach can improve the performance of the tested evolutionary algorithms for larger instances of the problem. Thus, while increasing the size of the problem, namely increasing the number of households, the proposed methodology will be more advantageous. Overall, vortex search overcomes all other tested algorithms (including the well-known differential evolution and particle swarm optimization) achieving around 30% better fitness value in all the cases, demonstrating its effectiveness in solving the proposed problem.