Efficient and Autonomous Energy Management Techniques for the Future Smart Homes

Smart grid with latest technologies provides solid foundation for the implementation of energy management systems at home premises. This paper proposes an autonomous energy management-based cost reduction solution for peak load times using a home energy management system (HEMS). Within a home environment, both the real time and the schedulable appliances are connected with smart meter through HEMS. We formulate an optimization problem under various practical constraints, which is shown to be a mixed integer programming problem that can be solved through a step-wise approach. A novel scheme based on Dijkstra algorithm is proposed, which results in the similar performance to that of the proposed optimal scheme while exhibiting much lower complexity. To further save the computational efforts, a low complexity scheme is also proposed, which produces considerably better results than the non-optimized scheme with the same complexity yet. Simulation results are presented at show the performance and complexity comparison of different proposed solutions and the existing methods.