CHAPTER 1.

INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, most of the electrical energy is generated from fossil fuels. Generating
electricity from fossil fuels comes with some challenges, such as increasing fuel costs and
undesired environmental impacts. Moreover, a remarkable part of the electricity is consumed in
homes. On the other hand, the need for electrical energy in home is growing continuously [1].
Therefore, reducing energy consumption in homes became an important motivation toward smart
grids. In the past decade, many researchers have been done in different aspects of smart grids,
such as demand managements and the integration of renewable energies to home. For example,
financial and technical aspects of using solar energy in different parts of the world have been
evaluated in [2,3]. Some researchers have investigated the implementation of the communication
infrastructures and analyzed their performance. In [4], comparisons of communication
technologies and network architectures for machine to machine (M2M) communications in home
area networks were studied. In [5], the authors investigated the performance analysis of aIEEE
802.15.4 based sensor network for smart grids communications. Some researchers studied the
importance of the behavior of appliances in home energy management.

A recent study classifies appliances into four classes and provides mathematical models
to describe their behavior [6]. In [7], the effect of user behavior on the energy consumption of
home appliances is studied. In [8], the authors propose a simulator that can predict the power
consumption profiles of individual appliances. Some researches concentrate on demand
management to reduce the peak load and household payment. In [9], the authors evaluated the
performance of an in-home energy management (IHEM) application and compared it with an
optimization-based residential energy management (OREM) scheme whose objective is to
minimize the household payment. In [10], a residential load commitment (LC) is presented to
achieve the minimum household payment. The LC problem was formulated to determine on/off
status of responsive appliances, charging/discharging cycles of Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles
(PHEVs). In [11], an Intelligent Energy Distribution Management (IEDM) scheme is proposed to
monitor changing environmental variables and manage solar power flexibly.

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 Most of the researchers have considered a single aspect of the home energy
management. we consider more than one aspect of the problem.

We propose an optimization-based home energy management system that manages

appliances and storage to achieve minimum household payment. This system uses an Integer
Linear Programming (ILP)-based model called ILPHEM as an optimization engine. The
proposed ILPHEM model has the following features:

1) It considers the availability of solar energy and local storage in the smart home.
2) It determines on/off status of responsive appliances as well as the usage intervals of
storage and grid electricity for each appliance.
3) It reschedules appliances and storage in real time if the input data change to ensure
minimum household payment
4) The ILPHEM can handle all pricing policies. The rest of the paper is organized as
follows. We introduce the proposed home energy management system. Formulates the
proposed ILPHEM model. The experimental results are provided and then followed by
the conclusion

Figure 1: Block diagram of home energy management

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 2. HOME ENERGY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

A Home Energy Management System (HEMS) consists of several parts. The Energy
Management Unit (EMU) is the central controller that schedules the appliances. As can been
seen in Fig 1, The EMU receives following data through Home Area Network (HAN).

• Responsive appliances data: Start time, Stop time and Serving time of
appliances services

• Current appliances status

• Current Battery Status

• Current power production rate of solar panels

• Current electricity price that is provided by the smart meter

EMU predicts some other required data. It uses history of production and consumption of
energy in home to predict future power consumption of non-responsive appliances and future
power production of solar panels.

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 3. ILP Home Energy Management model (ILPHEM)

Appliances in this model are divided to responsive and non-responsive groups. In the
responsive group, the allowable start and finish times of the appliance service is considered to be
known. In the non-responsive group, the future trend of power consumption of the appliances is
predicted since is essential for storage scheduling. In the proposed model, 24 hours of a day is
divided into 240 decision time intervals. In the other hand, the EMU attempts to reschedule the
current requests every six minutes. Nevertheless, the decision time interval can be reduced for
seamless decision making at the cost of more computational complexity.

3.1 Input data and variables

TABLE I and TABLE II describe sets and indices as well as decision variables used in
our optimization problem. Once the values of the decision variables are determined by the
proposed ILPHEM model, EMU issues the scheduling commands to the appliances.

Table I: Sets and Indices

Sets / Indices Description

I Appliance index
I Set of appliances
R Appliance request index
R Set of appliance requests
N Time slot index
N Set of timeslots

TABLE II: Decision variables

Decision variables Description

x(i,r,n)
Binary variable where 1 means allocating electricity to ith
appliance in the r* request and the n* interval

b(i,r,n) Binary variable where 1/0 means allocating electricity

from storage/grid to ith appliance in the rth request and the
nth interval

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 As stated in TABLE II, variable x decides whether the appliance is turned OFF or ON,
while variable b determines whether the appliance is supplied from storage or grid in the case it
is turned ON. For example, if x(2,3,85) = 1and b(2,3,85) = 1, EMU sends ‘ON with storage
electricity’ command to the 2nd appliance for its 3rd request in the 85th timeslot.

TABLE III describes data inputs and constant parameters. Some of these data inputs are predicted and the rest are
received via HAN

Input data Description

RE(i,n) Realistic energy consumption of i* non-responsive appliance in nth timeslot
C(n) Electricity price in the n* timeslot
E(i,r) Average energy consumption of ithappliance in its rth request

RPV(n) Realistic solar energy that is produced in n* timeslot

PV(n) Solar energy profile, which is a mixture of realistic solar energy produced in the past and
predicted solar energy for the future timeslots. That is: for n > t: PV(n) = PPV(n) for n
< t: P V(n) = RP V(n)
EE(i,n) Non-responsive appliance energy consumption profile, which is a mixture of
realistic energy consumption in the past and predicted energy consumption for the future
timeslots. That is: for n > t: EE(i,n) = PE(i,n) for n < t: EE(i, n) = RE(i, n)
s(i,r) Earliest allowable start timeslot of i thappliance in its rth request
dmax(i,r) Allowable delay of ith appliance in its r* request

,r) Latest allowable finish timeslot of i thappliance in its rthrequest. That is:
f(i,r)=s(i,r)+d max(i,r)

d(i,r) Number of timeslots required to service ith appliance in its rth request
Predicted data Description
PE(i,n) Predicted energy consumption of i thnon-responsive appliance in nth timeslot

PPV(n) Predicted solar energy that is produced in n* timeslot

Constant data Description

Max cap stor Maximum power capacity of storage
Max out_pow Maximum output power of storage

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3.2 Optimization Problem Constraints

Constraints for appliances regarding the proposed optimization problem are as follows:

Based on Equation (1) and Equation (2) , the variables are binary. Equation (3) and (4)
are for responsive appliances. These equations constrain appliances to their allowable service
time. In these equations, resembles s(i,k)and means f(i,k)which is itself equal to
s(i,k)+dmax(i,k). Equation (5) determines electrical energy consumption of non-responsive
appliances. For responsive appliances, the servicing timeslots must be continuous. Therefore,
Equation (6) constrains responsive appliances to be served continuously. On the other hand, if
x(i,r,n-1)is 1 and x(i,r,n)is 0, x(i,r,m)is forced to be 0 for all m>n. This means that if an appliance
gets OFF after it is served, it can’t get ON once again for the same request. The optimization
problem has following constraints for the storage.

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\ Equation (7) constrains allocating electricity from storage in the mthtimeslot to the stored
energy in the storage. Bat[m]which resembles ...is calculated in Equation (8). Equation (9) and
(10) determine the maximum stored energy capacity and maximum discharge power
respectively. In Equation (10), 6*60 resembles the length of one timeslot in seconds. Based on
Equation (11), if there is no request from the appliances, the storage is not allowed to supply any
electrical electricity.

3.3 Objective function

In our proposed home energy management system, the goal is to minimize the household
payment. Since the problem is solved in every timeslot during a day, the objective function
should be defined for each timeslot individually. Therefore, being in the tth timeslot of a day, the
objective function can be defined as:

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 4. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

We consider a home with seven appliances. Four of the appliances are non-responsive
with the specification summarized in TABLE IV.Forsimplicity; we assume only one request for
each appliance. The solar energy production pattern during a day is obtained from [12].

Appliances kW E S d dmax

Clothes dryer 4.5 0.45 100 8 140

Washing Machine 1.2 0.12 130 5 110

Dishwasher 0.4 .040 1 5 100

TABLE IV: Non-responsive appliances data

We considered a three-level tariffs which are obtained from [13] as illustrated in TABLE
V. The ILP model is solved by using GAMS. The simulations are done on a Core i5 computer
with 4GB DDR3 memory. Each simulation that was performed for each timeslot took about 2
seconds.

TOU period Time (hour) TOU rate (eTkWh)

Off-peak [24pm-7 am] 9.866

Mid-peak [7 am-10am] 11.453

On-peak [10am-20pm] 14.958

Mid-peak [20pm-24pm] 11.453

Off-peak [23pm-24pm] 9.866

Table V: Three level Tariffs

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4.1 Household Payment

To compare the obtained results with the conventional approaches, we consider the
following cases. In the first approach, there is a home with no controllable appliances and no
storage for storing the solar energy. It means that the responsive appliance cannot postpone the
requests. In the second approach, the appliances are controllable, but there is no storage. In the
third conventional approach, the appliances are not controllable, but there is a storage that stores
solar energy. However the storage cannot be scheduled to supply the energy in the best possible
interval and the appliances use the stored energy just after the storage gets charged with enough
energy. The last conventional approach is the case where the appliances are not controllable,
however there is a storage that can be optimally scheduled to supply energy in the best possible
interval based on the predicted solar energy and predicted workload.

Controllable appliances There are storage Controllable storage

Case 1 NO NO NO
Case 2 YES NO NO
Case 3 NO YES NO
Case 4 NO YES YES
ILPHEM YES YES YES
TABLE VI Different conventional approaches what are used for comparison with our proposed ILPHEM model.

In Fig. 2, the household payment values are gathered and illustrated for the mentioned
case approaches. Experimental results show that the proposed ILPHEM model decreases the
household payment by 20% in comparison with the third approach

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Fig. 2: Comparison of household payment of one day in different case studies. Fig. 3: Total
energy consumption pattern of appliances for case 3.

In Fig. 3, total energy consumption of appliances is depicted for the third approach. Total
energy consumption of appliances in the case of our proposed ILPHEM model is also depicted in
Fig. 4.

As it can be seen from these figures, our proposed method shifts the servicing time of
responsive appliances from ON-peak period to OFF-peak to reduce the household payment. For
example, Cloth dryer servicing time is shifted from 10am to 23pm. In Fig. 5, storage status is
illustrated for case 3. In this case, the storage discharging begins from 65th timeslot. In Fig. 6, the
storage status of ILPHEM model is depicted. In this case, the storage discharging begins from
100thtimeslot. It can be seen that ILPHEM model decides to discharge storage in peak timeslots
despite of case 3 where the storage is discharged by appliances whenever there are enough stored
electrical energy

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4.2 Responsive Scheduling

In a real scenario, the input data is changed in real time. For example, actual and
predicted produced solar energy may differ in several timeslots. Also, an appliance may have
several requests with different specifications during a day. As mentioned before in Section 2, our
proposed home energy management system is able to use the predicted request data and
predicted solar energy data to optimally schedule the new requests in the best possible interval in
a seamless way. In this section, to provide better insights into the effectiveness of proposed
method, we compared the seamless real time scheduling with a planned offline scheduling in the
case of new request. For the sake of simplicity, we just add a new responsive appliance request
with the following specifications:

• Snow (i=2, r=2) =200

• dnew (i=2, r=2) =5

• dmax_new (i=2, r=2) =40

• dmax_new (i=2, r=1) = dmax_old (i=2,r=1)– 40

ILPHEM reschedule the requests as it receives the new request based on the updated
input data.

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 In TABLE VII, the result of the reschedule attempt made by ILPHEM is compared with
an offline planned scheduling to show the effectiveness of the real time reschedule attempts.
TABLE VII shows that if the washing machine requests electricity at 130thtimeslot and changes
allowable delay of its servicing time for the first request, ILPHEM will be able to reschedule the
appliances for optimal household payment. But the offline scheduler cannot reschedule
appliances and the washing machine servicing time is done without delay.

TABLE VII Responsive scheduling before and after 130thtimeslot

Appliance Servicing time by offline Servicing time by

scheduler ILPHEM

Clothes dryer 231-238 231-238

Washing Machine(r=1) 131-135 155-159

Washing Machine(r=2) 201-205 231-235

Dishwasher 1-5 1-5

Household payment 1.28 ($) 1.26 ($)

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 CONCLUSION

An ILP-based home energy management model to manage appliances and storage in the
presence of solar energy and formulated the constraints of appliances and the storage. ILPHEM
decides for appliances and the stored energy in storage based on the updated data. This shows
that the proposed ILPHEM model reduces household payment by 20% compared to the best
conventional approaches.

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