In-home Appliances Research Articles

Long Term Energy Savings Through User Behavior Modeling in Smart Homes

The Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled real-time monitoring of energy consumption in smart homes through sensors embedded in the surrounding environment. In the post-pandemic world, domestic energy management has gained importance due to increased work-from-home consumption, making data collection in a smart home a relevant IoT application with many potential energy savings. However, this information is difficult for most users to understand, and existing monitoring systems’ savings results degrade over time. To address these challenges, this study presents a novel approach for domestic energy consumption, production, and comfort perception using color-based dashboards enhanced for user feedback interaction. The approach includes the management of in-home appliances and comfort levels according to user preferences to attain long-term energy savings. The approach includes multiple appealing strategies such as 3D representation, mobile connectivity, utility integration, and dynamic information, to increase long-term engagement and provides quantitative data on energy savings achieved for one year, where the average energy consumption was reduced by 19%. It was found that the approach sustained user engagement over time, with users actively participating in energy conservation efforts. A community survey with 208 participants was also developed and studied where 69% of the enquired considered our approach more attractive than existing market solutions, and 79% considered it more useful than existing solutions. Regarding the real-time information presented on our approach, 81% of the participants strongly or totally agree that it can change users’ behaviors.

A New Secure and Anonymous Metering Scheme for Smart Grid Communications

The smart meter is one of the most important components of the smart grid, which enables bi-directional communication between electric power providers and in-home appliances. However, the fine-grained metering mechanism that reports real-time electricity usage to the provider may result in some privacy and security issues for the owner of the smart meter. In this paper, we propose a new secure and anonymous smart metering scheme based on the technique of direct anonymous attestation and identity-based signatures. We utilize the trusted platform module to realize the tamper resistance of the smart meter. Moreover, our scheme is able to detect malfunctioning meters in which data is reported more than once in a time period. Finally, the performance and security results show that our proposed scheme is efficient and satisfies the security requirements of the smart grid communication system.

Variable Frequency Drive

This paper contains the discussion for control the speed of an Induction motor it means that varying frequency and voltage accordingly that converts its fixed frequency into variable frequency and fixed voltage to variable voltage which are using to control speed of an IM. Induction motors are extended used in Industry area or in-home appliances. VFD includes the power conversations with the help of Rectifier and Inverter using the IGBT. For the driver circuit battery is used. Here the PWM technique is also used for triggering pulses of IGBT. The speed of an IM is depending on the frequency. Load of an Induction motor is varying according the load requirement.so that speed must be changes according to the load requirement. If the supply voltage and the motor torque are also in proportional. If we want to maintain the torque, we must have to maintain speed of induction motor, so that slip of an Induction motor reduces. Hence the speed reduces and speed of an induction motor are proportional to that Frequency. In an industrial application the VFD is used for save the consumption of energy and electric billing. This paper is providing a detail of VFD and also provide the simulation on that.

Hybrid computation offloading for smart home automation in mobile cloud computing

Smart home automation enables the users to realize the access control of the in-home appliances by the mobile devices. With the rapid development of mobile cloud computing, offloading computation workloads of the home automation applications to nearby cloudlets has been treated as a promising approach to overcoming inherent flaws of portable devices, such as low battery capacity. The computing capacity of cloudlet is limited compared with the distant public cloud whose elastic computation resources are almost infinite. Therefore, some mobile services should wait for the occupied computation resources in the cloudlet to get released, which is less energy-efficient. In view of this challenge, we model the waiting time spending in the cloudlet as a M/M/m/ź queue and propose a hybrid computation offloading algorithm for home automation applications to minimize the total energy consumption of the mobile devices within a given constant deadline. The proposed algorithm combines cloudlet with public clouds, providing a more energy-efficient offloading strategy for home automation applications. Technically, a particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based heuristic algorithm is implemented to schedule mobile services. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithm.

Capacity Optimization in Heterogeneous Home Area Networks With Application to Smart Grid

This paper considers the problem of optimizing the downlink capacity in a heterogeneous home area network (HAN) with a beamforming technique at the smart meter for smart grid applications. We model the communication scenario between the smart meter and in-home appliances as a heterogeneous multiuser network. The optimal power-allocation algorithm is developed under the constraints that 1) each user satisfies individual signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) requirement for successful heterogeneous communication, 2) the sum of transmit power allocated to each user is equal to the permissible total transmit power at the smart meter, and 3) the allocated transmit power to each user is feasible. The optimization problem is mathematically shown to be convex, and the optimal power allocation is thus derived. By employing the theorem that the sum of independent exponentially distributed random variables follows Erlang distribution, the probability distribution function (pdf) of the smallest allocated transmit power is mathematically obtained from the properties of downlink indoor Saleh–Valenzuela (S–V) channels. It is analytically shown that the allocated transmit power has a lower limit, which is determined by the SINR threshold and the total number of active users in the HAN. Furthermore, numerical results verify the capacity performance improvements of the proposed optimal power-allocation scheme. It is also shown that beamforming technique contributes to the optimal power-allocation scheme.

A Communication-Based Appliance Scheduling Scheme for Consumer-Premise Energy Management Systems

In this paper, a communication-based load scheduling protocol is proposed for in-home appliances connected over a home area network. Specifically, a joint access and scheduling approach for appliances is developed to enable in-home appliances to coordinate power usage so that the total energy demand for the home is kept below a target value. The proposed protocol considers both “schedulable” appliances which have delay flexibility, and “critical” appliances which consume power as they desire. An optimization problem is formulated for the energy management controller to decide the target values for each time slot, by incorporating the variation of electricity prices and distributed wind power uncertainty. We model the evolution of the protocol as a two-dimensional Markov chain, and derive the steady-state distribution, by which the average delay of an appliance is then obtained. Simulation results verify the analysis and show cost saving to customers using the proposed scheme.

Analysis of the residential location choice and household energy consumption behavior by incorporating multiple self-selection effects

It is expected that the residential location choice and household energy consumption behavior might correlate with each other. Besides, due to the existence of self-selection effects, the observed inter-relationship between them might be the spurious result of the fact that some unobserved variables are causing both. These concerns motivate us to (1) consider residential location choice and household energy consumption behavior (for both in-home appliances and out-of-home cars) simultaneously and, (2) explicitly control self-selection effects so as to capture a relatively true effect of land-use policy on household energy consumption behavior. An integrated model termed as joint mixed Multinomial Logit-Multiple Discrete-Continuous Extreme Value model is presented here to identify the sensitivity of household energy consumption to land use policy by considering multiple self-selection effects. The model results indicate that land-use policy do play a great role in changing Beijing residents’ energy consumption pattern, while the self-selection effects cannot be ignored when evaluating the effect of land-use policy. Based on the policy scenario design, it is found that increasing recreational facilities and bus lines in the neighborhood can greatly promote household's energy-saving behavior. Additionally, the importance of “soft policy” and package policy is also emphasized in the context of Beijing.

Representing in-home and out-of-home energy consumption behavior in Beijing

It is expected that in-home and out-of-home energy consumption behavior in a household might be correlated with each other, probably due to the existence of household budget constraints. Ownership and usage of energy-saving technologies for in-home appliances (or vehicles) might lead to the increase in out-of-home (or in-home) energy consumption. It is therefore necessary to jointly represent in-home and out-of-home energy consumption in the same modeling framework. With this consideration, we first build a new type of energy consumption model based on the Multiple Discrete–Continuous Extreme Value (MDCEV) modeling framework. Next, we conducted a questionnaire survey in Beijing in 2009 and successfully collected the information about households’ energy consumption, ownership/usage of in-home appliances and vehicles, and households’ and their members’ attributes from 1014 households. Throughout an empirical analysis, it is confirmed that the MDCEV model is effective to simultaneously describe the in-home and out-of-home energy consumption behavior. In addition, it is revealed that a set of household and personal attributes affect the ownership and usage of in-home appliances and vehicles. Furthermore, it is shown that the unobserved factors play a much more important role in explaining energy consumption behavior than the observed attributes of households and their members.

Joint admission and rate control for multimedia sharing in wireless home networks

With the increasing popularity of broadband digital TV and digitized residential entertainment, home networking is attracting increasing attentions in the industry, the academia and the standardization organizations. Multimedia sharing is a promising service in home networks. Effective Quality-of-Service (QoS) provision for various multimedia services is a very significant challenge in home networks due to real-time transmission demand, multimedia heterogeneous characteristics and limited resources over radio interface (e.g. power, bandwidth). In this paper, we propose a Joint Admission and Rate Control (JARC) scheme for the QoS requirements of multimedia sharing in wireless home networks. JARC is designed to support QoS at both the user level and the network level. In particular, JARC ensures QoS provision at the user level using rate control at the application layer by considering the heterogenous nature of in-home digital appliances and exploiting the flexible multimedia processing. In addition, JARC is able to provide parameterized QoS guarantee at the network level using admission control of the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer by accurately predicting the QoS parameters with respect to packet delay and the bandwidth configuration of multimedia sessions. Simulation results demonstrate that JARC is able to flexibly allocate the wireless bandwidth to various multimedia services and provide QoS guarantee for multimedia applications in home networks.

Controlling the Smart Home from TV

In this paper we introduce a cooperative environment between the interactive digital TV (IDTV) and the networked home with the aim of allowing the interaction between interactive TV applications and the controllers of the in-home appliances in a natural way. Concretely, we have selected the MHP (multimedia home platform) standard, well-known in the IDTV field, and OSGi (open service gateway initiative), the most widely used open platform to set up residential gateways. To overcome the radically different conceptions below these two specifications we define a new kind of application, coined as XbundLET, which acts as a bridge between both worlds allowing MHP applications to use the OSGi services and vice versa, i.e., allowing OSGi applications to take advantage of the MHP functionality. As a further step towards integrated residential gateways, we also propose a semantic description for OSGi services at the smart home that facilitates services discovery and invocation from broadcast MHP applications.

Broadband consumer electronics networking and automation

AbstractAlthough a critical mass of households worldwide have access to the information superhighway, the broadband consumer networking and automation market is still evolving very slowly. Two reasons may be identified for this delay. The first one is related to the lack of broadband home data networks. Consumer electronics networks either do not exist at all or they are not able to support multimedia communications. The second reason is the large variety of ad hoc consortia or (un‐)authorized standardization bodies that have been defining independent, in many cases non‐interoperable specifications for residential networks. In this paper, we analyse and compare some of the most widely accepted, foreseen or advanced current and future broadband consumer electronics networking technologies able to support home automation and multimedia in‐home appliances. Technologies and standards are categorized in three groups based on their physical medium requirements. Moreover, we discuss technologies that are independent of the lower layers, and aim to provide convergence between multiple in‐home and access networks. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.