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.
@article{arxiv.2012.14624,
title = {Deferrable Load Scheduling under Demand Charge: A Block Model-Predictive Control Approach},
author = {Lei Yang and Xinbo Geng and Xiaohong Guan and Lang Tong},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.14624},
year = {2021}
}