An Intelligent Home Energy Management System to Improve Demand Response

Demand Response (DR) and Time-of-Use (TOU) pricing refer to programs which offer incentives to customers who curtail their energy use during times of peak demand. In this paper, we propose an integrated solution to predict and re-engineer the electricity demand (e.g., peak load reduction and shift) in a locality at a given day/time. The system presented in this paper expands DR to residential loads by dynamically scheduling and controlling appliances in each dwelling unit. A decision-support system is developed to forecast electricity demand in the home and enable the user to save energy by recommending optimal run time schedules for appliances, given user constraints and TOU pricing from the utility company. The schedule is communicated to the smart appliances over a self-organizing home energy network and executed by the appliance control interfaces developed in this study. A predictor is developed to predict, based on the user's life style and other social/environmental factors, the potential schedules for appliance run times. An aggregator is used to accumulate predicted demand from residential customers.