Cost-Effective and Comfort-Aware Electricity Scheduling for Home Energy Management System

Abstract

In the contex of smart grid, the energy management in residential side is a huge potential for energy saving, and meanwhile can improve the quality of residents' electricity usage. While various infrastructure and basic functions have been intensively studied, little attention has been given to how to schedule the operations of household appliances to increase residents' comfort level as well as reducing the electricity cost. In this paper, we propose a cost-effective and comfort-aware electricity scheduling strategy for home energy management system (HEMS). Firstly, the models of electric devices and energy storage device are presented. The deferrable tasks of household appliances are categorized into interruptible/non-interruptible ones and power-unadjustable/power-adjustable ones, and their constraints are mathematically described. Then, on the base of establishing a basic scheduling model for the HEMS to minimize the electricity payment, an optimal scheduling model considering consumer's comfort level is proposed, which can be formulated as a mixed integer nonlinear (MINL) problem. To verify the efficiency of the proposed algorithm, a number of simulations are performed under different scenarios. In addition, the influence of energy storage device on system performance has also been discussed.