Smart home scheduling for cost reduction and its implementation on FPGA

Abstract

In a typical smart home scenario, various household appliances of a residential user such as washing machine and plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) are connected via a home area network. Household appliances can be automatically scheduled by a central controller for satisfying the timing and energy constraints. It enables the reduction of monetary cost of electricity consumption and the peak energy load of the home system. On the other hand, the prevailing household appliances usually offer multiple discrete power levels. However, the existing smart home scheduling controllers can only handle the continuous power levels, while makes them unsuitable for prevailing household appliances. In this paper, a dynamic programming-based scheduling technique is proposed and implemented on FPGA to schedule household appliances with discrete power levels. It features a solution pruning technique, which can largely improve the time complexity. A case study which constitutes ten household appliances is performed. The experimental results demonstrate that our technique can reduce the monetary cost by 39.3% on weekday and 27.2% on weekend, respectively, comparing to the traditional scheduling. For energy consumption balancing, it shows that the peak to average ratio (PAR) of the energy consumption is reduced by 43.6% on weekday and 24.0% on weekend, respectively.