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Summary: In a demand‐side management (DSM) program, a set of activities are designed to influence electricity consumption in a way that may produce desired changes in the utility's load shape. Detailed analysis when planning DSM programs is crucial because the utility intends to achieve technical and economic benefits but does not wish to lose revenue unnecessarily. To assist utilities in planning for price‐based demand response (DR) programs (an approach to DSM), this paper proposes an optimization system focused on the targeting of residential customers to enroll in a new time‐of‐use tariff. The developed system uses optimal power flow to estimate the reduction needed to achieve the proposed objectives of the DR program in each bus, followed by the selection of the customers that will provide this reduction via binary particle swarm optimization. The optimization system has been tested using real data acquired from a Brazilian utility including customers' load curves, radial distribution feeder data, a time‐of‐use tariff, and estimated elasticity matrices from the literature. The main results show that the system can be of great value supporting power utilities' implementation of price‐based DR programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]