Load Profile-Based Coordination of Appliances in a Smart Home

Fine-scale load profile monitoring in smart home systems provides large sources of data for the energy consumption patterns of various home appliances. New opportunities for home energy management with high-level granularity can rise due to the increasing availability of load profile data. Such energy management is especially important for hybrid energy sources, which have limited power capacity for renewable energy. This paper introduces a home energy system that collects load profiles and supports event reservation with the proactive coordination of appliances. We address the problem of profile-based coordination among home appliances, which may operate concurrently. The coordination efficiency is measured by the total energy cost, which is a function of energy prices and the energy consumption at each energy source. We propose a profile-matched time-shift approach in order to minimize the total energy cost. The proposed approach identifies a set of start times of multiple home appliances according to the power consumption prices, delay tolerances, and energy sources capacities. The proposed method is evaluated by a comparison with other methods, such as random shifting. The results show that the profile-matched shifting of home appliances yields the lowest cost compared the costs of with other approaches.