Dynamic Time- and Load-Based Preference toward Optimal Appliance Scheduling in a Smart Home

In this paper, the household appliance scheduling based on the user predefined preferences is addressed. Previous works generally deal with this problem without integration of renewable energy sources (RESs) in smart home. The present paper proposes a new demand side management (DSM) technique considering time-varying appliance preferences and solar panel generation. The branch and bound (B&B) algorithm is developed based on three postulations that allow the time-varying preferences to be quantified in terms of time- and load-based features. Based on the input data including the load’s power rating, the absolute comfort derived from time- and load-preferences, the total energy available from the solar panels as well as the energy purchased from the utility grid, the (B&B) algorithm is run to generate the optimal energy consumption model that would give maximum comfort to the householder based on the mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) technique. To test the performance of the proposed mechanism, three scenarios are considered with local energy production and limited budget for purchasing the energy from the utility grid to cover the user needs. The simulation results reveal that the proposed DSM mechanism based on the MILP method offers maximum level of comfort for all the scenarios within the available energy limitation.