Grid aware home energy management system with electric vehicles and renewable energy

Home energy management system (HEMS) plays a vital role in transforming the function of traditional residential consumers into prosumers that can manage their power consumption and generation more efficiently. HEMS has become a challenging issue due to the recent developments in distribution systems and introducing new key players such as renewable energy sources (RESs) and electric vehicles (EVs) with stochastic behavior. This paper proposes a grid-aware HEMS by introducing a novel four-level architecture. Home Box (HBox) is the core of the proposed architecture and a gateway to consumers that manages the operation of the programmable devices using a proposed seven-step rolling horizon optimization algorithm. The proposed optimization algorithm is efficient and simple for implementation in real-time applications and considers (i) the setpoints received from a central energy management server, (ii) both users' and DSOs' preferences, and (iii) the stochastic behavior of the key players. Diverse simulations in the presence of photovoltaic (PV), EVs, and various household appliances demonstrate HBox's efficacy in a stochastic implementation in terms of starting time and type of each power request.