ISSN 1750-9653, England, UK International Journal of Management Science and Engineering Management Vol. 3 (2008) No. 4, pp. 243-252 Realtimes dynamic optimization for demand-side load management Duy Long Ha * , St´ ephane Ploix, Eric Zamai, Mireile Jacomino Laboratoire des Sciences pour la Conception, ´ lOptimisation et la Production (G-SCOP) , FRE3028 , BP46, F-38402 Saint Martin ´ dH` eres Cedex, France (Received December 14 2007, Accepted March 18 2008) Abstract. This paper focuses on Demand-Side load Management applied to residential sector. A multi-scale optimization mechanism for demand-side Load management is proposed. It composes the Load Management Layer, which carries out the distribution of the energy in housing. A dynamical limit for power consumption will be applied to each household. The home automation system integrated in each household plays the role of controlling the whole energy consumption in the housing by using service and appliances flexibilities, thus the energy consumption has the possibilities to be modified and controlled. Thanks to the feedback of the satisfaction of the client by the home automation system, the Load Management Layer can modify the limit of power consumption of the household again. This control mechanism takes dynamically into account the comfort of the users and satisfies the constraint from the energy production capabilities. A simulation of 400 housings points out the performance of this control mechanism. Keywords: load-Management, home automation, distributed control, multilevel optimization 1 Introduction Demand-Side load Management (DSM) [14] is a set of methods that co-ordinate the activities of energy consumers and energy providers in order to realize the best adaptation of energy production capabilities for consumer needs. Thanks to DSM, energy demand peaks, which on the one hand, have negative environmental impacts and on the other hand, increase energy production cost [15] , can be reduced. In residential sector, the development of Home Automation Systems (HAS) makes it possible for energy consumers to be involved in DSM by adapting their consumption to their production needs [16] . [15] presents basic kinds of DSM control: • Direct control that shifts power requests by directly interrupting the high power consuming appliances. • Local control that consists in setting up a policy, which encourages consumption at off-peak periods by reducing energy costs. However, these kinds of control are not very reactive and do not take into account user comfort. A HAS basically consists of appliances, which are allowed to communicate one each other via a communication This DSM control allows energy providers to charge users for the actual energy production cost in a more precise way. It also allows users to adjust their power consumption according to energy price variations. In the peak period, the domestic customer would be able to decide whether to wait and save money or to use appliances even so. This strategy is more reactive than the basic DSM control but more complex to control when comfort has to be taken into account. Energy management can be formulated as a scheduling problem where energy is considered as a resource shared by appliances, and periods of energy consumption are considered as tasks. Generally speaking, these * Corresponding author. E-mail address: Duy-Long.Ha@g-scop.fr. Published by World Academic Press, World Academic Union