A Hierarchical Smart Home Control System for Improving Load Shedding and Energy Consumption: Design and Implementation

This paper presents a hierarchical smart home control system, which controls the residential appliances. In this system, there are a supervisory controller, a secondary controller, and some smart plugs. The supervisory controller is the power utility, which produces the instantaneous or multi-time electricity tariffs and the appropriate load shedding commands. The secondary controller, which is central controller of the smart home connected to a smart power meter, produces ON/OFF commands to control the residential appliances optimally and automatically, which are connected to the smart plugs. The smart plugs apply the central controller commands to the appliances. The central controller considers tariff signal and load shedding commands to reduce the power consumption and costs while maintaining the consumer satisfaction. In this control system, the optimum time for customers to use each appliance is considered. Then, the best answer to the optimization using the brute-force search algorithm is selected and implemented in compliance with all constraints. In addition, conservation voltage reduction is considered and implemented in this system. The simulation results illustrate the performance of the hierarchical control system. The whole system is developed and implemented in a pilot home and is introduced in this paper.