Economic MPC-based Smart Home Scheduling with Comprehensive Load Types, Real-time Tariffs, and Intermittent DERs

Smart home scheduling, facilitated by advanced metering, monitoring, and manipulation technology, plays an important role in the energy transition in terms of accommodating intermittent renewable energy and improving energy consumption efficiency. The key functionalities of home energy scheduling are usually implemented by leveraging the flexibility of household appliances, such as thermostatically controlled loads (TCLs) and energy storage units, to improve the peak-to-average ratio for utilities and reduce energy bills for customers. However, the consumption patterns of appliances are greatly influenced by a variety of factors, including real-time tariffs, ambient temperature profiles, indoor activities, and solar irradiance. Hence, smart home energy scheduling is a challenging task because most of these impacting factors are stochastic and difficult to predict. To properly model and manage the uncertainty factors associated with smart home appliance scheduling, an economic model predictive control (MPC)-based bilevel smart scheduling scheme is proposed in this paper. The comprehensive modeling of distributed generation and household appliances is performed at the single-household level. The home energy scheduling problem is formulated on two levels, with the upper level emphasizing the economic impact and the lower level focusing on capturing TCL responses. The correlations among different TCLs and their performance under the influence of various uncertainty factors, such as environmental impacts and user behaviors, are considered. The efficiency of the proposed MPC-based bilevel optimization model and the effectiveness of the home energy scheduling strategy in managing uncertainties are validated and illustrated in numerical studies.