Um método de programação de horários de execução de aparelhos elétricos para minimizar o custo no consumo de energia em ambientes inteligentes

Abstract

Search for energy efficiency is currently one of the main global challenges. Energy demand is growing and this is attributed to increased energy consumption in homes. In this scenario of a big energy demand, public policies related to changes in the tariff structure of the bills have been applied in an attempt to improve the use of energy resources and prevent collapses in the Brazilian electric sector. It is becoming evident that the knowledge and the management of residential energy consumption need to be improved. Thus, home energy management systems have been proposed for monitoring and control of electrical infrastructure and appliances in homes. However, most existing solutions are designed with limited scope such as lighting control with motion detection, climate control based on ambient temperature and control of turning on and off electrical appliances. To overcome these limitations, studies have been conducted with the aim of providing features that minimize power consumption and energy costs based on the quantity of people in the residential and their profiles. Studies in the literature seek to generate schedules for the implementation of appliances considering different variables and constraints such as appliance power, runtime, variable rate by time, balanced usage of appliances out off-peak hours and user criteria of comfort/preference, featuring a NP-Hard optimization problem. To solve this problem, we propose in the work a method called Zippy, which assists the reduction of energy cost through running appliances schedules while meeting a set of predefined constraints. The proposed method uses Tabu Search metaheuristic to assist in the appliance execution schedule in a more economically way. Experiments carried out in a database from a home showed that the method is able to provide good programming acquiring an overall savings of up to 46% compared with the original cost obtained without the method.