Characterizing Quality of Experience for Demand Management in South Brazil

The present work delivers the results of a survey conducted in Florianopolis, on the southern region of Brazil, using a digital questionnaire which inquired about the interaction with demand management systems (DMSs) in a smart house context. In particular, the survey addressed the interviewees' thoughts on demand management and gathered data to enable the design of Quality of Experience (QoE) based demand management policies. The investigation of QoE-aware approaches is significant as it enables the DMS to take decisions not only based on economic metrics, but also taking the discomfort caused to the users into account. The number of responses guaranteed a confidence level of 95\% and an error margin of 4.63\% and the content of such responses showed favorable disposition of the interviewees on allowing interventions of DMSs on their energy consumption habits as long as it reduces their expenses with energy. The data concerning discomfort caused by demand management actions on several home appliances was treated using clustering techniques and different typical user profiles were leveraged, represented by the centroid of each cluster. Those profiles can be used to deploy QoE-aware DMSs tailored for the local reality, which seems as a promising business model as smart houses become a reality.