Optimization-based Home Energy Management in the Presence of
Solar Energy and Storage
Sattar Mohammadi*, Mahmoud Momtazpour**, and Esmaeil Sanaei***
Electrical Engineering Department, Sharif University of Technology
*sattar@ee.sharif.ir
**momtazpour@ee.sharif.ir
***sanaei@sharif.edu
Abstract: New technologies such as smart homes and
appliances and renewable energy production have been
attracting much attention in recent years. In practice, the
management of these technologies to get the minimum
household payment has become a challenge due to the time-
varying electricity price. In this paper, we propose a real time
energy management system to manage the appliances and
storages. The solar energy is charged in the storages and used
together with the grid electricity to supply the appliances. The
proposed management system uses an ILP-based Home Energy
Management (ILPHEM) optimization engine. ILPHEM
schedules appliances requests and storage usage based on
updated real time input data for minimum household payment.
Experimental results show that the proposed ILPHEM model
can reduce the household payments by 20% compared to the
best conventional approach.
Keywords: Home Energy Management, Integer Linear
Programming, Responsive appliances, Home Area
Network.
1. Introduction
Nowadays, most of the electrical energy is generated
from fossil fuels. Generating electricity from fossil fuels
comes with some challenges, such as increasing fuel costs
and undesired environmental impacts. Moreover, a
remarkable part of the electricity is consumed in homes.
On the other hand, the need for electrical energy in home
is growing continuously [1]. Therefore, reducing energy
consumption in homes became an important motivation
toward smart grids.
In the past decade, many researches have been done in
different aspects of smart grids, such as demand
managements and the integration of renewable energies
to home. For example, financial and technical aspects of
using solar energy in different parts of the world have
been evaluated in [2,3]. Some researchers have
investigated the implementation of the communication
infrastructures and analyzed their performance. In [4],
comparisons of communication technologies and network
architectures for machine to machine (M2M)
communications in home area networks were studied. In
978-1-4673-5634-3/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE
[5], the authors investigated the performance analysis of a
IEEE 802.15.4 based sensor network for smart grids
communications.
Some researchers studied the importance of the
behaviour of appliances in home energy management. A
recent study classifies appliances into four classes and
provides mathematical models to describe their behaviour
[6]. In [7], the effect of user behaviour on the energy
consumption of home appliances is studied. In [8], the
authors propose a simulator that can predict the power
consumption profiles of individual appliances.
Some researches concentrate on demand management
to reduce the peak load and household payment. In [9],
the authors evaluated the performance of an in-home
energy management (iHEM) application and compared it
with an optimization-based residential energy
management (OREM) scheme whose objective is to
minimize the household payment. In [10], a residential
load commitment (LC) is presented to achieve the
minimum household payment. The LC problem was
formulated to determine on/off status of responsive
appliances, charging/discharging cycles of Plug-in
Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs).
In [11], an Intelligent Energy Distribution
Management (iEDM) scheme is proposed to monitor
changing environmental variables and manage solar
power flexibly.
Most of the researchers have considered a single
aspect of the home energy management. In this paper we
consider more than one aspect of the problem. We
propose an optimization-based home energy management
system that manages appliances and storage to achieve
minimum household payment. This system uses an
Integer Linear Programming (ILP)-based model called
ILPHEM as an optimization engine. The proposed
ILPHEM model has the following features:
1) It considers the availability of solar energy and
local storage in the smart home.
Fig. 1: The overall diagram of the proposed home energy management system. EMU sends Data Request packets to Smart meter, Solar Panels and
Storage to request electricity price, current solar energy production rate and amount of stored energy respectively. After retrieving the requested data
along with the updated list of appliance requests, the EMU computes the optimal schedule of grid and storage energy supplies to the requests.

2) It determines on/off status of responsive future trend of power consumption of the appliances is
appliances as well as the usage intervals of predicted since is essential for storage scheduling. In the
storage and grid electricity for each appliance. proposed model, 24 hours of a day is divided into 240
3) It reschedules appliances and storage in real time decision time intervals. In the other hand, the EMU
if the input data change to ensure minimum attempts to reschedule the current requests every six
household payment. minutes. Nevertheless, the decision time interval can be
4) The ILPHEM can handle all pricing policies. reduced for seamless decision making at the cost of more
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In computational complexity.
Section 2, we introduce the proposed home energy
3.1 Input data and variables
management system. Section 3 formulates the proposed
ILPHEM model. In Section 4, the experimental results TABLE I and TABLE II describe sets and indices as
are provided and then followed by the conclusion in well as decision variables used in our optimization
Section 5. problem. Once the values of the decision variables are
2. Home energy management system determined by the proposed ILPHEM model, EMU issues
A Home Energy Management System (HEMS) the scheduling commands to the appliances.
consists of several parts. The Energy Management Unit
TABLE I: Sets and indices
(EMU) is the central controller that schedules the
appliances. As can been seen in Fig 1, The EMU receives Sets / Indices Description
following data through Home Area Network (HAN). i Appliance index
• Responsive appliances data: Start time, Stop I Set of appliances
time and Serving time of appliances services r Appliance request index
• Current appliances status R Set of appliance requests
n Time slot index
• Current Battery Status
N Set of timeslots
• Current power production rate of solar panels
• Current electricity price that is provided by the
TABLE II: Decision variables
smart meter
EMU predicts some other required data. It uses history Decision variables Description
of production and consumption of energy in home to Binary variable where 1 means
x(i,r,n) allocating electricity to ith appliance
predict future power consumption of non-responsive
in the rth request and the nth interval
appliances and future power production of solar panels. Binary variable where 1/0 means
3. ILP Home Energy Management model allocating electricity from
b(i,r,n)
(ILPHEM) storage/grid to ith appliance in the
rth request and the nth interval
Appliances in this model are divided to responsive and
non-responsive groups. In the responsive group, the
As stated in TABLE II, variable x decides whether the
allowable start and finish times of the appliance service is
appliance is turned OFF or ON, while variable b
considered to be known. In the non-responsive group, the
determines whether the appliance is supplied from
storage or grid in the case it is turned ON. For example, if
x(2,3,85) = 1 and b(2,3,85) = 1, EMU sends ‘ON with
storage electricity’ command to the 2nd appliance for its
3rd request in the 85th timeslot. TABLE III describes data
inputs and constant parameters. Some of these data inputs
are predicted and the rest are received via HAN.
TABLE III: Input Data, predicted data and constants
Input data Description
Realistic energy consumption of ith non-
RE(i,n)
responsive appliance in nth timeslot
C(n) Electricity price in the nth timeslot
Average energy consumption of ith
E(i,r)
appliance in its rth request
Realistic solar energy that is produced
RPV(n)
in nth timeslot
Solar energy profile, which is a mixture
of realistic solar energy produced in the
past and predicted solar energy for the
PV(n)
future timeslots. That is:
for n > t: PV(n) = PPV(n)
for n ≤ t: PV(n) = RPV(n)
Non-responsive appliance energy
consumption profile, which is a mixture
of realistic energy consumption in the
EE(i,n) past and predicted energy consumption
for the future timeslots. That is:
for n > t: EE(i,n) = PE(i,n)
for n ≤ t: EE(i,n) = RE(i,n)
Earliest allowable start timeslot of ith
s(i,r)
appliance in its rth request
Allowable delay of ith appliance in its rth
dmax(i,r)
request
Latest allowable finish timeslot of ith
f(i,r) appliance in its rth request. That is:
f(i,r)=s(i,r)+dmax(i,r)
Number of timeslots required to service
d(i,r)
ith appliance in its rth request
Predicted data Description
Predicted energy consumption of ith
PE(i,n)
non-responsive appliance in nth timeslot
Predicted solar energy that is produced
PPV(n)
in nth timeslot
Constant data Description
Max_cap_stor Maximum power capacity of storage
Max_out_pow Maximum output power of storage
3.2 Optimization Problem Constraints
Constraints for appliances regarding the proposed
optimization problem are as follows:
0 , , 1
(1)
0 , , 1 (2)
∑ , , , (3)
, , , , 0 4
: (5)
, 1, ,
(6)
, , , , 1 , , 1
Based on Equation (1) and Equation (2) , the variables are
binary. Equation (3) and (4) are for responsive
appliances. These equations constrain appliances to their
allowable service time. In these equations, s resembles
s(i,k) and f means f(i,k) which is itself equal to
s(i,k)+dmax(i,k). Equation (5) determines electrical energy
consumption of non-responsive appliances. For
responsive appliances, the servicing timeslots must be
continuous. Therefore, Equation (6) constrains responsive
appliances to be served continuously. On the other hand,
if x(i,r,n-1) is 1 and x(i,r,n) is 0, x(i,r,m) is forced to be 0
for all m>n. This means that if an appliance gets OFF
after it is served, it can’t get ON once again for the same
request. The optimization problem has following
constraints for the storage.
∑ ∑ , , (7)
∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ , (8)
, ,
_ _ (9)
∑ ∑ , , 6 60 _ _ (10)
, , , , (11)
Equation (7) constrains allocating electricity from
storage in the mth timeslot to the stored energy in the
storage. Bat[m] which resembles ... is calculated in
Equation (8). Equation (9) and (10) determine the
maximum stored energy capacity and maximum
discharge power respectively. In Equation (10), 6*60
resembles the length of one timeslot in seconds. Based on
Equation (11), if there is no request from the appliances,
the storage is not allowed to supply any electrical
electricity.
3.3 Objective function
In our proposed home energy management system, the
goal is to minimize the household payment. Since the
problem is solved in every timeslot during a day, the
objective function should be defined for each timeslot
individually. Therefore, being in the tth timeslot of a day,
the objective function can be defined as:
Minimize ∑ ∑ ∑N C n E i, r x i, r, n b i, r, n
4. Experimental Results
We consider a home with seven appliances. Four of the
appliances are non-responsive with the specification
summarized in TABLE IV. For simplicity, we assume
only one request for each appliance. The solar energy
production pattern during a day is obtained from [12].
 TABLE IV: Non-responsive appliances data In Fig. 2, the household payment values are gathered
and illustrated for the mentioned case approaches.
Appliances Hours/day Usage(kW)
Experimental results show that the proposed ILPHEM
Air condition 6 0.8
model decreases the household payment by 20% in
Refrigerator 9 0.6
comparison with the third approach.
PC 8 0.3
TV 8 0.3
3
TABLE V describes the remaining responsive

Household payment for one day ($)

appliances.
2.5
TABLE V: Responsive appliances data (r = 1)
2
Appliances kW E S d dmax
Clothes dryer 4.5 0.45 100 8 140 1.5
Washing Machine 1.2 0.12 130 5 110
Dishwasher 0.4 .040 1 5 100 1
We considered a three-level tariffs which are obtained
from [13] as illustrated in TABLE VI. The ILP model is 0.5
solved by using GAMS. The simulations are done on a
Core i5 computer with 4GB DDR3 memory. Each 0
simulation that was performed for each timeslot took Case 1 Case 2 Case 3 Case 4 ILPHEM
about 2 seconds.
TABLE VII: Three level tariff Fig. 2: Comparison of household payment of one day in
different case studies.
TOU period Time (hour) TOU rate (¢/kWh)
Off-peak [24pm-7 am] 9.866 In Fig. 3, total energy consumption of appliances is
Mid-peak [7 am-10am] 11.453 depicted for the third approach. Total energy
On-peak [10am-20pm] 14.958 consumption of appliances in the case of our proposed
Mid-peak [20pm-24pm] 11.453 ILPHEM model is also depicted in Fig. 4. As it can be
Off-peak [23pm-24pm] 9.866 seen from these figures, our proposed method shifts the
4.1 Household Payment servicing time of responsive appliances from ON-peak
period to OFF-peak to reduce the household payment.
To compare the obtained results with the conventional
For example, Cloth dryer servicing time is shifted from
approaches, we consider the following cases. In the first
10am to 23pm.
approach, there is a home with no controllable appliances
In Fig. 5, storage status is illustrated for case 3. In this
and no storage for storing the solar energy. It means that
case, the storage discharging begins from 65th timeslot. In
the responsive appliance cannot postpone the requests. In
Fig. 6, the storage status of ILPHEM model is depicted.
the second approach, the appliances are controllable, but
In this case, the storage discharging begins from 100th
there is no storage. In the third conventional approach,
timeslot. It can be seen that ILPHEM model decides to
the appliances are not controllable, but there is a storage
discharge storage in peak timeslots despite of case 3
that stores solar energy. However the storage cannot be
where the storage is discharged by appliances whenever
scheduled to supply the energy in the best possible
there are enough stored electrical energy.
interval and the appliances use the stored energy just after
the storage gets charged with enough energy. The last
conventional approach is the case where the appliances 0.6
are not controllable, however there is a storage that can
Total appliances energy usage (kWh)

0.5
be optimally scheduled to supply energy in the best
possible interval based on the predicted solar energy and 0.4
predicted workload.
TABLE III Different conventional approaches what are used for 0.3
comparison with our proposed ILPHEM model.
0.2
Controllable There are Controllable
appliances storage storage 0.1
Case 1 NO NO NO
Case 2 YES NO NO 0
Case 3 NO YES NO
1
15
29
43
57
71
85
99
113
127
141
155
169
183
197
211
225
239

Case 4 NO YES YES Periods

ILPHEM YES YES YES
Fig. 3: Total energy consumption pattern of appliances for case 3
 0.25 possible interval in a seamless way. In this section, to
provide better insights into the effectiveness of proposed
method, we compared the seamless real time scheduling
Total appliances energy usage (kWh)

0.2
with a planned offline scheduling in the case of new
request. For the sake of simplicity, we just add a new
0.15 responsive appliance request with the following
specifications:
0.1 • snew(i=2,r=2)=200
• dnew(i=2,r=2)=5
0.05 • dmax_new (i=2,r=2)=40
• dmax_new(i=2,r=1) = dmax_old(i=2,r=1) – 40
0
ILPHEM reschedule the requests as it receives the new
1
21
48
73
85
104
114
127
137
147
157
167
177
197
207
217
227
237
Periods
request based on the updated input data. In TABLE VIII,
the result of the reschedule attempt made by ILPHEM is
Fig. 4: Total energy consumption pattern of appliances for ILPHEM
compared with an offline planned scheduling to show the
effectiveness of the real time reschedule attempts.
0.5 TABLE VIII shows that if the washing machine requests
0.45 electricity at 130th timeslot and changes allowable delay
0.4 of its servicing time for the first request, ILPHEM will be
Storage discharging (kWh)

0.35 able to reschedule the appliances for optimal household

0.3 payment. But the offline scheduler cannot reschedule
0.25 appliances and the washing machine servicing time is
0.2 done without delay.
0.15
0.1 TABLE VIII Responsive scheduling before and after 130th timeslot
0.05
0
Servicing time Servicing
Appliance by offline time
60
68
76
84
92
100
108
116
124
132
140
148
156
164
172
180
188
196

scheduler by ILPHEM
Periods Clothes dryer 231-238 231-238
Washing
Fig. 5: Storage discharging pattern for Case 3 131-135 155-159
Machine(r=1)
Washing
0.25 201-205 231-235
Machine(r=2)
Dishwasher 1-5 1-5
0.2 Household
Storage discharging (kWh)

1.28 ($) 1.26 ($)

payment
0.15

0.1 5. Conclusion

0.05
In this paper, we proposed an ILP-based home energy
management model to manage appliances and storage in
the presence of solar energy. We formulated the
0
constraints of appliances and the storage. ILPHEM
97
105
111
120
128
135
141
147
153
159
165
171
177
189
199
206

decides for appliances and the stored energy in storage

Periods
Fig. 6: Storage discharging pattern in the case of ILPHEM model
4.2 Responsive Scheduling
In a real scenario, the input data is changed in real
time. For example, actual and predicted produced solar
energy may differ in several timeslots. Also, an appliance
may have several requests with different specifications
during a day. As mentioned before in Section 2, our
proposed home energy management system is able to use
the predicted request data and predicted solar energy data
to optimally schedule the new requests in the best
based on the updated data. We showed that the proposed
ILPHEM model reduces household payment by 20%
compared to the best conventional approaches.
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