Impact on electricity use of introducing time-of-use pricing to a multi-user home energy management system

Home energy management system technology can provide a smart and efficient way of optimizing energy usage in residential buildings. This paper presents a home energy management system algorithm that monitors and controls household appliances based on time-of-use (TOU) energy pricing models while accounting for multiple inhabitants sharing a home and its appliances. This algorithm helps to manage and schedule usage by prioritizing multiple users with preferred usage patterns. Two different scenarios will be implemented to develop and test the influence of a multiple-users and load priority (MULP) algorithm on reducing energy consumption, energy cost and carbon footprint. In the first scenario, TOU pricing and different demand limits are used, while the second scenario focuses on the TOU pricing with different demand limits combined with the MULP model. Simulation results show that the combination of the MULP model and the TOU pricing leads to significant reductions in user payments and total energy consumption. Copyright (C) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.