Heuristics for the cost-effective management of a temperature controlled environment

This study investigates the use of linear programming based heuristics for solving particular energy allocation problems. The main objective is to minimize the cost of using a collection of air conditioning units in a residential or commercial building also, keeping the inside temperature within preset comfort levels. Optimal methods do not scale well when the number of appliances or the system time granularity grows past a certain threshold. We find that heuristics based on relaxation and rounding offer a good trade-off between cost and computation time is needed.