Efficient energy resource scheduling for sustainable diversified farming

Abstract

Diversified farming has an important role to play in the economic activity of any country. It provides raw materials to numerous industries along with meeting the food demands of the people. Continuous and cost effective supply of electricity is one of the main challenges in the diversified farming sector. Integration of renewable energy sources at the farm level and/or the village level coupled with the efficient management of these resources can alleviate the problem of continuous and cost effective supply of electricity to the diversified farming sector. In this research, efficient energy resource scheduling in diversified farming has been proposed to manage the energy resources efficiently. The proposed scheme can perform real time energy forecasting of renewable resources and controllable loads for making proper short term scheduling to minimize the total operating cost. A branch and bound algorithm is used for binary integer linear programming problems for optimization. This helps to minimize energy consumption from utilities. It maximizes the profit of farmers and minimizes the cost of energy. Efficient energy resource scheduling in diversified farming helps to achieve a trade-off between the operation cost, peak load, and farmer welfare.