Characterizing Quality of Experience for Demand Management in South Brazil

TL;DR

This study surveys residents in Florianópolis, Brazil, to understand their perceptions of demand management systems in smart homes, aiming to develop QoE-based policies that balance user comfort and energy savings.

Contribution

It provides empirical data on user acceptance of demand management in Brazilian smart homes and proposes user profiles for tailored QoE-aware demand management strategies.

Findings

High acceptance of demand management interventions if they reduce energy costs.

Discomfort caused by demand actions can be modeled with clustering techniques.

User profiles enable personalized demand management policies.

Abstract

The present work delivers the results of a survey conducted in Florian\'{o}polis, 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.