Privacy-Aware Cost-Effective Scheduling Considering Non-Schedulable Appliances in Smart Home

TL;DR

This paper proposes a privacy-aware, cost-effective scheduling method for smart home appliances, including non-schedulable ones, that minimizes electricity costs while protecting user privacy using an iterative algorithm evaluated on real data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel iterative algorithm for scheduling both schedulable and non-schedulable appliances to balance cost and privacy in smart homes.

Findings

The algorithm effectively reduces electricity costs.

It maintains user privacy under worst-case scenarios.

Experimental results validate the approach's practicality.

Abstract

A Smart Home provides integrating and electronic information services to help residential users manage their energy usage and bill cost but also exposes users to significant privacy risks due to fine-grained information collected by smart meters. Taking account of users' privacy concerns, this paper focuses on cost-effective runtime scheduling designed for schedulable and non-schedulable appliances. To alleviate the influence of operation uncertainties introduced by non-schedulable appliances, we formulate the problem by minimizing the expected sum of electricity cost under the worst privacy situation. Inventing the iterative alternative algorithm, we effectively schedule the appliances and rechargeable battery in a cost-effective way while satisfying users' privacy requirement. Experimental evaluation based on real-world data demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.