OPTIMIZATION OF ENERGY MANAGEMENT IN THE EXISTENCE OF SOLAR ENERGY

A.LOKESH 1, V.SREENIVASULU 2
II-.BTECH, EEE, AITS, RAJAMPETA
ABSTRACT: New technologies such as smart

[1]. Therefore, reducing energy consumption in

homes

energy

homes became an important motivation toward smart

production have been attracting much attention in

grids. In the past decade, many researches have been

recent years. In practice, the management of these

done in different aspects of smart grids, such as

technologies to get the minimum household payment

demand

has become a challenge due to the time-varying

renewable energies to home. For example, financial

electricity price. In this paper, we propose a real time

and technical aspects of using solar energy in

energy management system to manage the appliances

different parts of the world have been evaluated in

and storages. The solar energy is charged in the

[2,3]. Some researchers have investigated the

storages and used together with the grid electricity to

implementation of the communication infrastructures

supply the appliances. The proposed management

and analyzed their performance. In [4], comparisons

system uses an ILP-based Home Energy Management

of

(ILPHEM) optimization engine. ILPHEM schedules

architectures for machine to machine (M2M)

appliances requests and storage usage based on

communications in home area networks were studied.

updated real time input data for minimum household

In [5], the authors investigated the performance

payment.

the

analysis of a IEEE 802.15.4 based sensor network for

proposed ILPHEM model can reduce the household

smart grids communications. Some researchers

payments by 20% compared to the best conventional

studied the importance of the behaviour of appliances

approach.

in home energy management. A recent study

and

appliances

Experimental

and

results

renewable

show

that

managements

communication

and

the

technologies

integration

and

of

network

classifies appliances into four classes and provides

Keywords: Home Energy Management, Integer

mathematical models to describe their behaviour [6].

Linear Programming, Responsive appliances, Home

In [7], the effect of user behaviour on the energy

Area Network.

consumption of home appliances is studied. In [8],

the authors propose a simulator that can predict the

1. Introduction

power consumption profiles of individual appliances.

Some researches concentrate on demand management

Nowadays, most of the electrical energy is generated

to reduce the peak load and household payment. In

from fossil fuels. Generating electricity from fossil

[9], the authors evaluated the performance of an in-

fuels comes with some challenges, such as increasing

home energy management (iHEM) application and

fuel costs and undesired environmental impacts.

compared it with an optimization-based residential

Moreover, a remarkable part of the electricity is

energy

consumed in homes. On the other hand, the need for

objective is to minimize the household payment. In

electrical energy in home is growing continuously

management

(OREM)

scheme

whose

[10], a residential load commitment (LC) is presented

1) It considers the availability of solar energy

to achieve the minimum household payment. The LC

and local storage in the smart home.

2) It determines on/off status of responsive

problem was formulated to determine on/off status of

responsive appliances, charging/discharging cycles of
Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs). In [11], an
Intelligent Energy Distribution Management (iEDM)
scheme

is

proposed

to

monitor

changing

environmental variables and manage solar power

appliances as well as the usage intervals of

storage

and

grid

electricity for

each

appliance.
3) It reschedules appliances and storage in real
time if the input data change to ensure

flexibly. Most of the researchers have considered a

minimum household payment

4) 4) The ILPHEM can handle all pricing

single aspect of the home energy management. In this

policies. The rest of the paper is organized

paper we consider more than one aspect of the

as follows. In Section 2, we introduce the

problem. We propose an optimization-based home

proposed home energy management system.

energy management system that manages appliances

Section 3 formulates the proposed ILPHEM

and storage to achieve minimum household payment.

model. In Section 4, the experimental results

This system uses an Integer Linear Programming

are provided and then followed by the

(ILP)-based model called

conclusion in Section 5.

ILPHEM as an optimization engine. The proposed

ILPHEM model has the following features:

2. Home energy management system

Responsive appliances data: Start time, Stop time

and Serving time of appliances services

A Home Energy Management System (HEMS)

consists of several parts. The Energy Management
Unit (EMU) is the central controller that schedules
the appliances. As can been seen in Fig 1, The EMU
receives following data through Home Area Network
(HAN).

Current appliances status

Current Battery Status
Current power production rate of solar panels

 Current electricity price that is provided by the

consumption of the appliances is predicted since is

smart meter

essential for storage scheduling. In the proposed

EMU predicts some other required data. It uses

history of production and consumption of energy in
home to predict future power consumption of nonresponsive appliances and future power production of
solar panels.

3. ILP Home Energy Management model

model, 24 hours of a day is divided into 240 decision

time intervals. In the other hand, the EMU attempts
to reschedule the current requests every six minutes.
Nevertheless, the decision time interval can be
reduced for seamless decision making at the cost of
more computational complexity.
3.1 Input data and variables

(ILPHEM)
TABLE I and TABLE II describe sets and indices as
Appliances in this model are divided to responsive

well as decision variables used in our optimization

and non-responsivegroups. In the responsive group,

problem. Once the values of the decision variables

the allowable start and finish times of the appliance

are determined by the proposed ILPHEM model,

service is considered to be known. In the non-

EMU issues the scheduling commands to the

responsive group, the future trend of power

appliances

TABLE I: Sets and indices

TABLE II: Decision variables

Sets / Indices

Description

Appliance index

I
R

Set of appliances
Appliance request
Decision variables
index
Set of appliance

R
n

requests
Time
slot index

Description

x(i,r,n)

Binary variable where 1 means allocating

electricity to ith appliance in the r* request
and the n* interval

b(i,r,n)

Binary variable where 1/0 means

allocating electricity from storage/grid
to ith appliance in the rth request and the
nth interval

Set of timeslots

As stated in TABLE II,

variable

decides

whether the appliance is

turned OFF or ON, while
variable

b determines

whether the appliance is supplied from storage or

grid in the case it is turned ON. For example, if
x(2,3,85) = 1and b(2,3,85) = 1, EMU sends ON with
storage electricity command to the 2 nd appliance for
its 3rd request in the 85th timeslot.

TABLE III describes data inputs and constant

parameters. Some of these data inputs are predicted
and the rest are received via HAN.

Input data

RE(i,n)
C(n)
E(i,r)

Description

Realistic energy consumption of i* non-responsive appliance in nth timeslot

Electricity price in the n* timeslot
Average energy consumption of ith appliance in its rth request

RPV(n)

Realistic solar energy that is produced in n* timeslot

PV(n)

Solar energy profile, which is a mixture of realistic solar energy produced in

the past and predicted solar energy for the future timeslots. That is: for n >
t: PV(n) = PPV(n) for n < t: P V(n) = RP V(n)

EE(i,n)

Non-responsive
appliance
energy consumption profile, which is a
mixture of realistic energy consumption in the past and predicted energy
consumption for the future timeslots. That is: for n > t: EE(i,n) = PE(i,n)
for n < t: EE(i, n) = RE(i, n)

s(i,r)
dmax(i,r)
,r)
d(i,r)
Predicted data
PE(i,n)
PPV(n)
Constant data
Max cap stor
Max out_pow

Earliest allowable start timeslot of i th appliance in its rth request

Allowable delay of ith appliance in its r* request
Latest allowable finish timeslot of i th appliance in its rthrequest. That is:
f(i,r)=s(i,r)+d max(i,r)
Number of timeslots required to service ith appliance in its rth request
Description
Predicted energy consumption of i th non-responsive appliance in nth
timeslot
Predicted solar energy that is produced in n* timeslot
Description
Maximum power capacity of storage
Maximum output power of storage

3.2 Optimization Problem Constraints

Constraints for appliances regarding the proposed
optimization problem are as follows:
.
Based on Equation (1) and Equation (2) , the
variables are binary. Equation (3) and (4) are for
responsive appliances. These equations constrain
appliances to their allowable service time. In these
equations, sresembles s(i,k)and fmeans f(i,k)which is

itself

equal

to

s(i,k)+dmax(i,k).

Equation

(5)

resembles the length of one timeslot in seconds.

determines electrical energy consumption of non-

Based on Equation (11), if there is no request from

responsive appliances. For responsive appliances, the

the appliances, the storage is not allowed to supply

servicing timeslots must be continuous. Therefore,

any electrical electricity.

Equation (6) constrains responsive appliances to be

served continuously. On the other hand, if x(i,r,n-1)is

3.3 Objective function

1 and x(i,r,n)is 0, x(i,r,m)is forced to be 0 for all m>n.

In our proposed home energy management system,

This means that if an appliance gets OFF after it is

the goal is to minimize the household payment. Since

served, it cant get ON once again for the same

the problem is solved in every timeslot during a day,

request. The optimization problem has following

the objective function should be defined for each

constraints for the storage.

timeslot individually. Therefore, being in the tth

timeslot of a day, the objective function can be
defined as:

4. Experimental Results
Equation (7) constrains allocating electricity from
storage in the mthtimeslot to the stored energy in the
storage. Bat[m]which resembles ...is calculated in
Equation (8). Equation (9) and (10) determine the
maximum stored energy capacity and maximum
discharge power respectively. In Equation (10), 6*60

We consider a home with seven appliances. Four of

the

appliances

specification

are

non-responsive

summarized

in

with

TABLE

the

IV.For

simplicity, we assume only one request for each

appliance. The solar energy production pattern during
a day is obtained from [12].

TABLE IV: Non-responsive appliances data

TOU period

Time (hour)

TABLE V: Responsive
TOU rate (eTkWh)

Off-peak

[24pm-7 am]

9.866

Mid-peak

[7 am-10am]

11.453

On-peak

[10am-20pm]
Applian kW
E
ces [20pm-24pm]
Clothes dryer
4.5
[23pm-24pm]
Washing Machine 1.2

Mid-peak
Off-peak

appliances data

Dishwasher
0.4
Hours/day
Usage(kW)

Appliances
Air condition

0.8

Refrigerator

0.6

PC

0.3

TV

0.3

We considered a three-level tariffs which are obtained

from [13] as illustrated in TABLE VI. The ILP model
is solved by using GAMS. The

4.1
To

dmax

0.45

100

140

0.12

130

110

.040

100

14.958
11.453
9.866

(r = 1)

simulations are done on a Core i5 computer with

4GB DDR3 memory. Each simulation that was
performed for each timeslot took about 2 seconds

Household Payment
compare

the

obtained

results

with

the

that stores solar energy. However the storage cannot

conventional approaches, we consider the following

be scheduled to supply the energy in the best possible

cases. In the first approach, there is a home with no

interval and the appliances use the stored energy just

controllable appliances and no storage for storing the

after the storage gets charged with enough energy.

solar energy. It means that the responsive appliance

The last conventional approach is the case where the

cannot postpone the requests. In the second approach,

appliances are not controllable, however there is a

the appliances are controllable, but there is no

storage that can be optimally scheduled to supply

storage. In the third conventional approach, the

energy in the best possible interval based on the

appliances are not controllable, but there is a storage

predicted solar energy and predicted workload.

TABLE III Different conventional approaches what are used for comparison with our proposed ILPHEM model.

Case 1
Case 2
Case 3
Case 4
ILPHEM

Controllable appliances

There are storage

Controllable storage

NO
YES
NO
NO
YES

NO
NO
YES
YES
YES

NO
NO
NO
YES
YES

In Fig. 2, the household payment values are gathered and illustrated for the mentioned case approaches.
Experimental results show that the proposed ILPHEM model decreases the household payment by 20% in
comparison with the third approach

Fig. 2: Comparison of household payment of one day in different case studies. Fig. 3: Total energy consumption
pattern of appliances for case 3

In Fig. 3, total energy consumption of appliances is

Fig. 5, storage status is illustrated for case 3. In this

depicted for the third approach. Total energy

case, the storage discharging begins from 65th

consumption of appliances in the case of our

timeslot. In Fig. 6, the storage status of ILPHEM

proposed ILPHEM model is also depicted in Fig. 4.

model is depicted. In this case, the storage

As it can be seen from these figures, our proposed

discharging begins from 100th timeslot. It can be seen

method shifts the servicing time of responsive

that ILPHEM model decides to discharge storage in

appliances from ON-peak period to OFF-peak to

peak timeslots despite of case 3 where the storage is

reduce the household payment. For example, Cloth

discharged by appliances whenever there are enough

dryer servicing time is shifted from 10am to 23pm. In

stored electrical energy

4.2 Responsive Scheduling

snew(i=2,r=2)=200

In a real scenario, the input data is changed in real

dnew(i=2,r=2)=5

time. For example, actual and predicted produced

solar energy may differ in several timeslots. Also, an
appliance may have several requests with different
specifications during a day. As mentioned before in
Section 2, our proposed home energy management
system is able to use the predicted request data and
predicted solar energy data to optimally schedule the
new requests in the best possible interval in a
seamless way. In this section, to provide better
insights into the effectiveness of proposed method,
we compared the seamless real time scheduling with
a planned offline scheduling in the case of new
request. For the sake of simplicity, we just add a new
responsive appliance request with the following
specifications:

dmax_new(i=2,r=2)=40
dmax_new(i=2,r=1) = dmax_old(i=2,r=1) 40
ILPHEM reschedule the requests as it receives the
new request based on the updated input data. In
TABLE VIII, the result of the reschedule attempt
made by ILPHEM is compared with an offline
planned scheduling to show the effectiveness of the
real time reschedule attempts. TABLE VIII shows
that if the washing machine requests electricity at
130th timeslot and changes allowable delay of its
servicing time for the first request, ILPHEM will be
able to reschedule the appliances for optimal
household payment. But the offline scheduler cannot
reschedule appliances and the washing machine
servicing time is done without delay.

TABLE VIII Responsive scheduling before and after 130th times lot
Servicing time by offline scheduler

Servicing time by ILPHEM

Clothes dryer
Washing Machine(r=1)

231-238
131-135

231-238
155-159

Washing Machine(r=2)

201-205

231-235

Household payment

1.28 ($)

1.26 ($)

Appliance

decides for appliances and the stored energy in

5. Conclusion

storage based on the updated data. We showed that

In this paper, we proposed an ILP-based home energy
management model to manage appliances and storage
in the presence of solar energy. We formulated the

the proposed ILPHEM model reduces household

payment by 20% compared to the best conventional
approaches.

constraints of appliances and the storage. ILPHEM

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