Innovations in the residential sector are required to reduce environmental impacts, as the sector is a contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. The increasing demand for electricity and the emergence of smart grids have presented new opportunities for home energy management systems (HEMS) in demand response markets. HEMS are demand response tools that shift and curtail demand to improve the energy consumption and production profile of a dwelling on behalf of a consumer. HEMS usually create optimal consumption and productions schedules by considering multiple objectives such as energy costs, environmental concerns, load profiles and consumer comfort. The existing literature has presented several methods, such as mathematical optimization, model predictive control and heuristic control, for creating efficient operation schedules and for making good consumption and production decisions. However, the effectiveness of the methods in the existing literature can be difficult to compare due to diversity in modelling parameters, such as appliance models, timing parameters and objectives. The present chapter provides a comparative analysis of the literature on HEMS, with a focus on modelling approaches and their impact on HEMS operations and outcomes. In particular, we discuss a set of HEMS challenges such as forecast uncertainty, modelling device heterogeneity, multi-objective scheduling, computational limitations, timing considerations and modelling consumer well-being. The presented work is organized to allow a reader to understand and compare the important considerations, approaches, nomenclature and results in prominent and new literary works without delving deeply into each one.

Home energy management systems: A review of modelling and complexity

The advancement of renewable energy technologies has seen the emergence of customer owned grid tied wind and solar microgrids. These microgrids offer an opportunity to energy users to lower their energy costs as well as enabling the power suppliers to regulate the utility grid. However, the integration of the renewable energy based sources into the smart grid increases the complexity of the main grid. The success of this scheme will be heavily reliant on accurate real-time information exchange between the microgrid, the main grid, and the consumers. The communication between these agents will be critical in implementation of intelligent decisions by the smart grid. The microgrids will be required to relay energy forecasts information to the utility grid. Similarly, customers will be expected to submit energy demand schedules, to actively monitor energy price signals, to participate in energy bids, and to respond to energy management signals in real time. This kind of grid-user interaction will be overwhelming and could result in consumer apathy. There is therefore a need to develop smart systems that will autonomously execute all these tasks without the prompting of the customers. This paper presents one such approach. In this study, we proposed a demand side energy management for a grid connected household with a locally generated photovoltaic energy. To ensure efficient household energy management, smart scheduling of electrical appliances has also been presented.

Autonomous Appliance Scheduling for Household Energy Management

Smart charging and appliance scheduling approaches to demand side management

The increasing interest in smart home technologies has created a need for a comprehensive literature survey. This article reviews the goals of a smart home energy management system, along with related definitions, applications, and information about the manufacturing of its components. The challenges associated with smart home energy management systems and possible solutions are examined, and the energy factors that contribute to a customer's electricity bill are discussed. A number of price schemes and the load models needed for solving related scheduling optimization problems are also presented, including a review of the literature related to energy management system scheduling with respect to its control, automation, and communication.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/15325008.2013.832439

Smart Home Activities: A Literature Review

With the exploding power consumption in private households and increasing environmental and regulatory restraints, the need to improve the overall efficiency of electrical networks has never been greater. That being said, the most efficient way to minimize the power consumption is by voluntary mitigation of home electric energy consumption, based on energy-awareness and automatic or manual reduction of standby power of idling home appliances. Deploying bi-directional smart meters and home energy management (HEM) agents that provision real-time usage monitoring and remote control, will enable HEM in “smart households.” Furthermore, the traditionally inelastic demand curve has began to change, and these emerging HEM technologies enable consumers (industrial to residential) to respond to the energy market behavior to reduce their consumption at peak prices, to supply reserves on a as-needed basis, and to reduce demand on the electric grid. Because the development of smart grid-related activities has resulted in an increased interest in demand response (DR) and demand side management (DSM) programs, this paper presents some popular DR and DSM initiatives that include planning, implementation and evaluation techniques for reducing energy consumption and peak electricity demand. The paper then focuses on reviewing and distinguishing the various state-of-the-art HEM control and networking technologies, and outlines directions for promoting the shift towards a society with low energy demand and low greenhouse gas emissions. The paper also surveys the existing software and hardware tools, platforms, and test beds for evaluating the performance of the information and communications technologies that are at the core of future smart grids. It is envisioned that this paper will inspire future research and design efforts in developing standardized and user-friendly smart energy monitoring systems that are suitable for wide scale deployment in homes.

https://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/jcnc/2012/932181.pdf

A Survey of Communications and Networking Technologies for Energy Management in Buildings and Home Automation

This paper focuses on Demand-Side load Management applied to residential sector. A multi-scale optimization mechanism for demand-side Load management is proposed. It compose the Agent Management of Energy, it carries out the distribution of the energy of the housing by proposing a dynamical threshold of total energy consumption will be applied to each household. The home automation system integrated in each household plays the role of controlling all the energy consumption in the housing by using service flexibilities, which have the possibilities to be modified and controlled. Thanks to the feedback of the satisfaction of the client by the home automation system, the Agent Management can modify the limit of power consumption of the household again. This mechanism of control takes dynamically into account the comfort of the users and satisfies the constraint from the energy production capabilities. A simulation of 200 housings is also illustrated the performance of this control mechanism.

F.F. de Lamotte

Papers

Real-time dynamic multilevel optimization for Demand-side Load management