A Heuristics-based Home Energy Management System for Demand Response

The so-called Internet of Things (IoT) and advanced communication technologies have already demonstrated a great potential to manage residential energy resources via demand-side management. This work presents a home energy management system in that focused on the energy reallocation problem where consumers shall shift their energy consumption patterns away from peak periods and/or high electricity prices. Our solution differentiates residential loads into two categories: (i) fixed power appliances and (ii) flexible ones. Therefrom, we formulate our problem as a constraint optimization problem, which is non-linear and cannot be mathematically solved in closed-form. We then employ and compare two well-known heuristics, the genetic algorithm (GA) and the harmony search algorithm (HSA), to minimize electricity expense and peak to average ratio. These two approaches are compared to the case where no reallocation happens. Our numerical results show that both methods; GAand HSA can effectively reduce the electricity cost by 0.9%, 3.98%, and PAR by 15%, 5.8%, respectively