Home energy management incorporating operational priority of appliances

Home energy management (HEM) schemes persuade residential customers to actively participate in price-based demand response (DR) programs. In these price-based HEM methods, a controller schedules the energy consumption of household's controllable appliances in response to electricity price signals, considering various customer preferences. Although numerous methods have been recently proposed for HEM application, prioritizing the operation of controllable appliances from the customer's viewpoint in price-based HEM has not been addressed, which is the focus of the present paper. To do this, the value of lost load (VOLL) of each appliance is defined to indicate the operational priority of that appliance from the customer perspective. Considering appliances' VOLL, electricity tariffs, and operational constraints of appliances, an optimization problem is proposed to minimize customer energy and reliability costs. The output of the proposed HEM would be the optimum scheduling of household electrical demand. Numerical studies illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed HEM method in a smart home, considering different time-varying electricity pricings. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.