Considering grid limitations in profile steering

Demand side management is often envisioned as a promising technique to reduce peak loads, and match local generation and consumption in the future smart grid. To exploit flexibility offered by smart appliances, a methodology is required to steer the appliances towards better utilization of the grid. As conventional grid reinforcements are very costly, the main objective is often peak shaving to reduce stress on network assets. In this work, we consider a demand side management methodology based on profile steering. This approach generates schedules for controllable devices in a hierarchical way. We show that, when the available flexibility is unevenly distributed, profile steering leads to schedules that violate local grid constraints. We then introduce a modification that enables the methodology to consider local limits on the generated schedules. With this modification, we show that the generated schedules respect the local limits imposed without significantly altering the resulting total load profile.