Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Tesla: An Extended Study Of An Energy-Saving Agent That Leverages Schedule Flexibility, Jun Young Kwak, Pradeep Varakantham, Rajiv Maheswaran, Milind Tambe, Burcin Becerik-Gerber

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents transformative energy-saving schedule-leveraging agent (TESLA), an agent for optimizing energy usage in commercial buildings. TESLA’s key insight is that adding flexibility to event/meeting schedules can lead to significant energy savings. This paper provides four key contributions: (i) online scheduling algorithms, which are at the heart of TESLA, to solve a stochastic mixed integer linear program for energy-efficient scheduling of incrementally/dynamically arriving meetings and events; (ii) an algorithm to effectively identify key meetings that lead to significant energy savings by adjusting their flexibility; (iii) an extensive analysis on energy savings achieved by TESLA; and (iv) surveys of real …