A Metaheuristic Scheduling of Home Energy Management System

Smart grid (SG) provides a prodigious opportunity to turn traditional energy infrastructure into a new era of reliability, sustainability and robustness. The outcome of new infrastructure contributes to technology improvements, environmental health, grid stability, energy saving programs and optimal economy as well. One of the most significant aspects of SG is home energy management system (HEMS). It encourages utilities to participate in demand side management programs to enhance efficiency of power generation system and residential consumers to execute demand response programs in reducing electricity cost. This paper presents HEMS on consumer side and formulates an optimization problem to reduce energy consumption, electricity payment, peak load demand, and maximize user comfort. For efficient scheduling of household appliances, we classify appliances into two types on the basis of their energy consumption pattern. In this paper, a meta-heuristic firefly algorithm is deployed to solve our optimization problem under real time pricing environment. Simulation results signify the proposed system in reducing electricity cost and alleviating peak to average ratio.