Flexible demand-side management program in accordance with the consumers' requested constraints.

• The aim of demand-side management is to reduce peak consumption during peak hours. • Low participation of consumers is the vital challenge in DSM. • A flexible DSM method is presented in accordance with consumers' constraints. • The lowest and highest possible consumption of each consumer are considered. • The stability of consumers' total consumption in some time periods is considered. Increasing electrical energy consumption during peak hours leads to increased electrical energy losses and the spread of environmental pollution. For this reason, demand-side management programs have been introduced to reduce consumption during peak hours. The most important challenge of these programs is the low participation of consumers due to their special constraints. Hence, presenting a flexible demand-side management program that optimizes the consumption pattern of consumers in accordance with their requested constraints will have a significant impact on further participation of consumers in reducing the peak consumption. In this paper, a flexible demand-side management program is presented that provides the optimal consumption patterns, by using the stair-step pricing mechanism and considering the consumers requested constraints. The proposed method is carried out for a combination of consumers with various requested constraints such as the lowest and highest possible consumption per hour and the stability of the total consumption of each consumer in a certain period of time. The simulation outcome showed that the proposed algorithm is able to encourage consumers to participate more in energy management program by meeting their various requested constraints. Peak load total consumption experienced a decline of 25.09% from 36649.4 to 27454.3 kW-hours. As a result, the daily energy cost had been reduced by 10.27 % from 13854.466 to 12,431 dollars. This cost reduction was derived from reducing the need for additional energy generation during peak hours due to transferring consumptions to the lower-priced hours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]