Offline Scheduling of Power Loads in Smart Grids

In this paper, we formulate and study a scheduling problem related to Smart Grids. Specifically, the goal is to schedule a set of power loads with same start time and deadlines using minimum peak power. A job can be scheduled anytime after the start time as long as it finished before the deadline. Certain jobs have the added flexibility of being scheduled intermittently i.e. with intermissions in the power supply. We formulate ILPs for this problem. We observe that this problem is closely related to the 2d rectangle packing problem: strip packing. We extend some classic heuristics of the strip packing for our purpose. The ILPs and heuristics are extensively evaluated using simulated experiments.