Multi-Objective Energy Management of a Smart Home in Real Time Environment

In home energy management, the occupants schedule the operating appliances to achieve lowest optimal energy cost with minimum discomfort. Smart home energy management turns out to be challenging due to the penetration of rooftop intermittent solar power generations. This article develops a multi-objective and real time smart residential load management and hence energy management topology considering variation in rooftop solar power generation with variation in price of distribution grid energy. Primarily, the optimization problem is established as a time average stochastic optimization formulation and then simplified to mixed integer linear programming (MILP) using Lyapunov optimization. The energy cost minimization objective is added with ocular and thermal discomfort minimization which also lowers the discomfort level for occupants due to actions caused by real time load management. The home loads are managed by an Internet-of-Things (IoT) based controller which also alerts the occupants for any incipient malfunction in the household loads. The proposed control technique is authenticated on a real-life smart residential data with simulations and experiments. The resultant controller can thus optimally control the smart residential loads in real time.