Home Energy Management using Integer Programming

Abstract

Over the years, countries have been exploring options to solve the current global energy crisis. It hinders economic development due to a lack of proper energy management infrastructure and higher energy consumption, resulting in an imbalance between demand and supply. Thus, this paper presents the application of integer programming in home energy management to develop an integer programming model that monitors and controls energy consumption trends in real-time while considering available energy units balance based on which devices are turned on at that particular time. The energy consumption optimization problem was formulated by considering prepaid billing consumers who can only switch their devices as per limited available energy at any given time. The devices were controlled with the help of a mobile application, and real-time power consumption was obtained from the deployed sensors on our system. The results confirm that the proposed model can predict the amount of time it takes for the available electricity balance to run out based on energy consumed by powered-on devices. This interval gets dynamically updated in real-time and also considers device status change. Hence, this will help consumers to make data-driven decisions on energy usage allocation and device activation prioritization while considering the availability of remaining energy units as one of the constraints leading to improved energy usage efficiency and sustainability as well as cost savings.