Optimal Planning of Electrical Appliance of Residential Units in a Smart Home Network Using Cloud Services

Abstract

One of the important aspects of realizing smart cities is developing smart homes/buildings and, from the energy perspective, designing and implementing an efficient smart home area energy management system (HAEMS) is vital. To be effective, the HAEMS should include various electrical appliances as well as local distributed/renewable energy resources and energy storage systems, with the whole system as a microgrid. However, the collecting and processing of the data associated with these appliances/resources are challenging in terms of the required sensors/communication infrastructure and computational burden. Thanks to the internet-of-things and cloud computing technologies, the physical requirements for handling the data have been provided; however, they demand suitable optimization/management schemes. In this article, a HAEMS is developed using cloud services to increase the accuracy and speed of the data processing. A management protocol is proposed that provides an optimal schedule for a day-ahead operation of the electrical equipment of smart residential homes under welfare indicators. The proposed system comprises three layers: (1) sensors associated with the home appliances and generation/storage units, (2) local fog nodes, and (3) a cloud where the information is processed bilaterally with HAEMS and the hourly optimal operation of appliances/generation/storage units is planned. The neural network and genetic algorithm (GA) are used as part of the HAEMS program. The neural network is used to predict the amount of workload corresponding to users’ requests. Improving the load factor and the economic efficiency are considered as the objective function that is optimized using GA. Numerical studies are performed in the MATLAB platform and the results are compared with a conventional method.