A Centralized Home Energy Management System to Minimize Consumer’s Electricity Bill

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to explore a mathematical approach to modeling and optimizing the energy consumption of household appliances. The approach is based on a Centralized Home Energy Management System (HEMS) which schedules the use of home appliances to coincide with a lower electricity tariff resulting in a reduced electricity bill. The studied problem is modeled as a combination of Linear Programming (LP) and Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) and solved using both free and commercial softwares. Numerical results for simulated scenarios are provided to showcase the applicability of the approach. After studying this issue, we resorted to using methods to solve the integer linear programming problem and finally presented a program that facilitates this work. Keywords: Home Energy Management System, Mixed Integer Linear Programming, Energy Minimization, Home Appliances Scheduling.