ABSTRACT Demand response has been one of the efficient and highly effective energy management solutions for the smart grid environment, which uses various load curtailment and scheduling policies to minimize energy consumption and peak load demand. Recent advances in direct load control techniques show a significant reduction in peak load demand, resulting in smoother load profiles. However, a majority of the existing work misses out on the practical aspects where appliances are of mixed categories, viz., preemptive, non-preemptive, deferrable, non-deferrable, etc. In this paper, we consider addressing the problem of scheduling deferrable and non-deferrable appliances that have inter-dependency constraints among them. Considering the complexity of the problem, we propose a greedy algorithm to obtain near-optimal solutions relatively quicker than the optimal solutions. The performance of the proposed algorithm has been evaluated and compared with existing algorithms on real-world power consumption data. The results obtained show that the proposed mechanism is highly efficient and produces schedules with a lesser peak as compared to the existing algorithms.