  Smart home appliances can time-shift and curtail their power demand to assist
demand side management or allow operation with limited power, as in an off-grid
application. This paper proposes a scheduling process to start appliances with
time-varying deterministic load profiles. Self-triggered model predictive
control is used to limit the household net power demand below a given
threshold. Meanwhile, deterministic load profiles are more difficult to
schedule compared to variable charging or thermal loads because system failure
will occur once power demand is not satisfied. The proposed scheme formulates
the decision of the load shifting time as a continuous optimization problem,
and an inhomogeneous time grid system is introduced to handle the optimization
of different appliances and their consensus at this resolution. The efficacy of
the proposed scheme is studied by numerical comparison with a mixed-integer MPC
controller and by a case study of three home appliances and an interruptible
washing machine.
