NRG4-U: a novel home energy management system for a unique loadprofile

Abstract

ABSTRACT Home Energy Management Systems (HEMSs) are developed to facilitate residential energy management toward a more efficient way while enhancing the residents’ energy awareness. Within this paper, a novel non-intrusive, advisory and low-cost home eNeRGy management system FOR a Unique load profile (NRG4-U) is proposed to generate a target personalized load profile for each user to manage energy while preserving comfortable living conditions. The user is able to monitor all systems applications through a visualization dashboard. NRG4-U individual modules gradually generate a user-based profile including preferences, routines, and energy base load. Thermal and visual comfort are estimated through a fusion algorithm for better results. Occupancy and activity inference are estimated by auto-generating an energy base-load exploiting hidden Markov models without using any manual pre-processing task or ground truth. Personalized recommendations are sent to alert the users for energy saving actions while motivating them to adapt to more efficient energy usage. The main source of generating energy savings is the real time recommendations that inform the user about changing the operational states of appliances that may not be necessary at the given time, or may be functioning for excessive time. The suggested HEMS tool (NRG4-U) has been deployed in residential environments, while the experimental results demonstrate that it is a compelling tool for personalized load profile and energy awareness. Results demonstrate that using the NRG4-U HEMS can result in average monthly energy savings of 7%.