A Kernel-Based Real-Time Adaptive Dynamic Programming Method for Economic Household Energy Systems

Modern home energy management systems (HEMSs) have great flexibility of energy consumption for customers, but at the same time, bear a range of problems, such as the high system complexity, uncertainty and time-varying nature of load consumptions, and renewable sources generation. This has brought great challenges for the real-time control. To solve these problems, we propose an HEMS that integrates a kernel-based real-time adaptive dynamic programming (K-RT-ADP) with a new preprocessing short-term prediction technique. For the preprocessing short-term prediction, we propose a gated recurrent unit-bidirectional encoder representations from the transformer (GRU-BERT) model to improve the forecasting accuracy of electrical loads and renewable energy generation. In particular, we classify household appliances into the temperature-sensitive loads, human activity sensitive loads, and insensitive/constant loads. The GRU-BERT model can incorporate weather and human activity information to predict load consumption and solar generation. For real-time control, we propose and employ the K-RT-ADP HEMS based on the GRU-BERT prediction algorithm. The objective of the K-RT-ADP HEMS is to minimize the electricity cost and maximize the solar energy utilization. To enhance the nonlinear approximation ability and generalization ability of the adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) algorithm, the K-RT-ADP algorithm leverages kernel mapping instead of neural networks. Hardware-in-the-loop experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed K-RT-ADP HEMS over the traditional ADP control through comparison.