Multiobjective Home Appliances Scheduling Considering Customer Thermal Discomfort: A Multistep Look-ahead ADP-Based Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multiobjective energy management system for homes that balances electricity costs and thermal comfort using a multistep look-ahead approximate dynamic programming approach.

Contribution

It presents a novel multistep look-ahead ADP-based scheduling algorithm for home energy management considering thermal discomfort and variable electricity prices.

Findings

Effective trade-off between cost and comfort achieved.

Algorithm overcomes curse of dimensionality in dynamic programming.

Numerical simulations validate the approach's efficiency.

Abstract

This paper proposes a multiobjective home energy management unit (MO_HEMU) to balance the electricity payment and thermal discomfort of a household by properly scheduling devices in a time varying price environment. The thermal discomfort is measured by the deviation of indoor and hot water temperature from the users ideal temperature. The home devices include solar Photovoltaics, a battery storage system, deferrable, and thermal appliances. The proposed MOHEMU is formulated as a dynamic program and a method based on the approximated dynamic programming is used as the scheduling algorithm. The developed method, called multistep look ahead algorithm, is an iterative algorithm that overcomes the curse of dimensionality of the exact DP by choosing a decision based on a limited number of stages ahead. The effectiveness of the proposed model is investigated through numerical simulations. The proposed MO_HEMU enables customers to find the desired trade off between electricity payment and a discomfort level.