An Optimal Electrical Energy Management Scheme for Future Smart Homes

The future trend in the energy sector is to have smart grid technologies that involve energy management schemes for domestic level consumers. This addresses the issue of increased energy consumption and the cost incurred in it. This project proposes a solution to optimize the energy consumption and to reduce the energy cost, based on an optimal electrical energy management scheme designed for future smart homes using a Home Energy Management System (HEMS). Domestic devices can be either real-time or schedulable according to user's preference and they are connected to a smart meter through a HEMS. An energy constraint has been considered based on future peak demands and an algorithm that will optimize the energy management of the appliances has been developed. The proposed scheme is a novel algorithm based on the Dijkstra algorithm with lower complexity. The main objectives of this scheme are optimization of electrical energy usage, energy cost minimization and minimum interference to users' preferences. Simulation results are presented to allow comparison of the performance of different existing algorithms and proposed scheme.