Internet-of-Things-Based Smart-Home Time-Priority-Cost (TPC)-Aware Energy Management System for Energy Cost Reduction

Smart homes are developed with a high emphasis on residents' comfort, convenience, and healthcare. They also have the potential for better energy consumption through proper system management. In this letter, an Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart-home energy management system is designed to provide efficient management of energy. We first propose an IoT-based architecture that uses ZigBee devices for communication between the appliances and the energy management unit (EMU). The latter is connected to a number of different energy sources, each with a unique priority. Compared to the literature that relies on the manual scheduling of tasks by the user, we derive an algorithm for the EMU to provide automatic real-time scheduling of requested user tasks. The algorithm is time-priority-cost (TPC) aware, i.e., it uses information about the availability time, assigned priority, and associated cost of different energy sources to efficiently utilize them and reduce their total consumption cost. Results show that the proposed TPC-aware EMU significantly reduces the total cost by up to 33%.