Summary
Peak power consumption is one of the most critical issues for power system operation and sustainability. To overcome this issue, the available energy resources may be utilized in an efficient way. Demand‐side management (DSM) may be used for the efficient utilization of the available resources to reduce the peak power consumption by rescheduling the shiftable appliances. Apart from this, a number of other objectives are also achieved by DSM. In the literature, DSM is used to reduce the electricity cost, curtail peak hour's demand, diminish peak‐to‐average power ratio, and minimize the distribution losses. To the best knowledge of the authors, none of the research articles has considered all the mentioned objectives in a single model. To fill this research gap, we propose a unified DSM model where we focus to get the abovementioned objectives of DSM in a single framework. This unified DSM framework also gives liberty to the power system administration for the operation of the system with exchange policies of government and the company itself. While getting the abovementioned objectives, our proposed unified model can take care of a number of DSM features including importance of heterogeneous load, load shedding, human interaction factor, peak clipping, valley filling, load shifting, appliances priorities, and consumer preferences.