A smart home controller using an integer programming approach for the optimization of consumer economic saving and comfort

Abstract

Energy efficiency is a vital subject for the world. In the years to come it is expected that residences and industries will become smart consumers and the grid will be used more efficiently. A smart home controller can help the residential consumers to achieve economic savings by moving the start of each load to times of low tariff. A side effect yet to be studied is the impact on the customer comfort of such controller. In this paper the comfort problem will be mathematically described as a integer programming optimization problem and it will be demonstrated by computer simulations that it is possible to achieve high levels of economic saving without a great impact on the user comfort level by making the controller optimize a combination of both objective functions.