A HOME AUTOMATION SYSTEM TO IMPROVE HOUSEHOLD ENERGY CONTROL Duy Long Ha Stephane Ploix Eric Zamai Mireille Jacomino

{rstname.name}@inpg.fr LAG (Laboratoire dAutomatique de Grenoble) B.P 46, 38402 St-Martin dH`res CEDEX e France

Abstract: This paper presents a new three-layer household energy control system capable both to satisfy the maximum available electrical energy constraint and to maximize user comfort criteria. These layers are composed by: an equipment layer, with local and fast control mechanism, a protection layer, which is triggered when energy constraints are violated, and an anticipation mechanism, which adjusts future set-points of equipments in order to tackle energy events that can be forseen. The scheduling problem of the set-points of equipments is modelled by a graph and solved by the Bellman-Fords algorithm. This control mechanism makes it possible to have a more exible control of the overall power consumption in housing in exploiting natural thermal energy accumulation.Copyright c 2006 IFAC Keywords: Energy control system, home automation, scheduling, dynamic programming

1. INTRODUCTION Demand-Side load Management (DSM) (G. Thomas, 2000) are methods that coordinate the activities of energy consumers and energy providers in order to best t energy production capabilities with consumer needs and, in this way, avoiding energy demand peaks, which generally have adverse environmental impacts and increase energy production costs (Wacks, 1991). In residential sector, the development of Home Automation (HA) systems bring the possibility for energy consumers to participate in DSM systems by automatically adapting their consumption to production needs (Wacks, 1993). (Wacks, 1991) presents basic kinds of DSM control: Direct control that actually forces shift of the customer electricity demand by directly

interrupting the high power-consuming appliances. Local control that consists in setting up a policy where energy prices encourage consumption at o-peak periods when the total consumption is low. However, these kinds of control are not very reactive and does not take into account user comfort and cannot make distinction between the dierent appliances. A home automation system (Peter and Ratko, 1997) basically consists of appliances linked via a communication network allowing appliances to communicate one each other. These home automation systems can carry out a new load management mechanism called distributed control (Wacks, 1993). This DSM control allows energy providers to charge user for the actual energy production cost in a very precise way, and it also

allows the user to adjust his power consumption according to energy price variation. In the peak period, the domestic customer would be able to decide whether to wait and save money or to use appliances even so. The demonstration in (Boivin, 1995) shows that the HA systems can oer savings of up to 15% or even 20% on electric bill by more eciently managing household demand. This strategy is more reactive than DSM control but more complex to control by user. Because the user comfort is not taken into account automatically. Energy management problem can be formulated as scheduling problem where energy is considered as a resource shared by appliances, and device energy demands are considered as tasks. Generally speaking, these approaches coordinate consumption activities in scheduling all tasks as soon as possible in order to reduce the overall consumption while satisfying maximum energy resource constraint. These approaches do not manage dierences between predictions and eective values. (Penya, 2003) proposes a solution based on one-day user consumption predictions. A parallel and distributed genetic algorithm optimizes the consumption of buildings in order to adjust the energy provider needs and users demands. In (Duy Long et al., 2005), an adaptation of the static Resource Constraint Project Scheduling Problems (RCPSP) is presented to improve the management of electric heating systems. This approach is able to coordinate the controls of electric heaters while satisfying the resource constraint. Nevertheless, the problem requires precise predictive models and, moreover, it is NP-hard. This paper presents a new three-layer household energy control system capable both to satisfy the maximum available electrical energy constraint and to maximize user satisfaction criteria. This approach brings more reactivity for tting the energy provider needs. The proposed control strategy mainly relies on interactions between calculators embedded into domestic appliances. Thermal air environments equipped with electric heaters are used to illustrate the capability of the control mechanism. Natural thermal accumulation is used to adjust power consumption in real time because they are the main consumption factor during winter in continental regions. However, the approach can be easily extrapolated to other situations such as Heat, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems. The rest of paper is organized as follow: section 2 deals with problem modeling, including thermal and comfort modeling. In section 3, a problem formulation is proposed. Section 4 depicted the anticipation layer and section 5 the protection layer. Results are presented in section 6.

2. OVERALL MECHANISM The main issue in HA scheduling problems is the presence of uncertainties in thermal predictive models: solar radiation, outdoor temperature and services requested by inhabitants cannot be predicted with accuracy. Therefore, in practice, robust scheduling approaches are not very ecient because the uncertain events are often more important than events that can be predicted. In order to solve this issue a three layer architecture is proposed: an equipment layer, a protection layer and an anticipation layer. The equipment layer, composed by existing control systems, is responsible of adjusting equipment controls in order to reach given set points in spite of perturbations. It contains local controllers generally embedded into equipments by manufacturers. The time responses of this layer are the shortest. This layer, which is under equipment manufacturer responsibility, is not revisited by this paper. The protection layer is responsible of decision making in case of violation of predened constraints dealing either with energy or with comfort. It is a real time mechanism. It can be seen as an emergency layer, which contains withdrawal control strategy taking into account, as much as possible, user comfort and cost criteria. The control actions may be either to enable or disable controllers of the equipment layer. The sampling period of the protection layer is equal to p . The anticipation layer is responsible of managing predicted events dealing with electric sources or with electric loads in order to avoid the use of protection layer. This layer has slow dynamics (typically 15 minutes) and includes predictive models with learning mechanisms 1 and anticipative control mechanisms that can schedule energy production and consumption several hours in advance. This layer adjusts set points of the equipment layer controllers. The sampling period of the anticipation layer is equal to a = np p . 2.1 Protection mechanism Anticipation layer manages as much as possible predicted events, but it can not guarantee that the power constraints are never violated. This is why a real time protection mechanism is required. In home automation system, protection mechanisms such as unbalancing devices, are often present. This protection mechanism is triggered when consumption overpass a threshold corresponding to the maximum power consumption allowed. Usual unbalancing devices try to gradually cut o electric lines usually connected to high power devices such as heaters. Nevertheless, even if unbalancing systems protect from power
1

including models for user habits

constraint violation, it does not take into account what happen in thermal air environments. A more intelligent protection mechanism based on the current user satisfaction is used as a complement of the anticipation mechanism. When the total power consumption overpasses the maximum available power, an overload signal is sent by electricity meter to equipments. Equipments then reply by sending an estimated user satisfaction value detailed in section 3.3. Heaters with highest satisfaction are then deactivated rst, until the maximal power constraint is satised. This allocation is reconsidered each protection period p . Protection mechanism is an emergency mechanism, which is considered as transparent by the anticipation layer. It manages critical situation in minimizing eects on user comfort but it is not able to coordinate equipments in order to face the predicted events: this is the role of the anticipation mechanism.

3. PROBLEM MODELING Because of the importance of stochastic events such as perturbation induced by humans, outdoor temperature or solar radiations, a precise predictive model cannot be found. However, a relevant model for anticipation has to be dened. It should cover three aspects: electrical power, thermal behavior and user comfort.

3.1 Power constraints Protection and anticipation layer have to cope with a maximum power constraint: during each anticipative period, a maximum available power cannot be overpassed. It depends on the anticipative period when sources are solar panels or windmill. It may also be constant when the source comes from a contract with an energy provider. For the sake of simplicity, all the environments are assumed to be purely resistive. Therefore, the total power consumption corresponds to the summation of power consumptions in environments:
n

2.2 Anticipation mechanism Anticipation mechanism musts rely on a model whose accuracy is suitable for prediction. Instead of working with instantaneous values, the principle is to split time into anticipation periods a , larger than protection period a >> p in order that the protection mechanism remains transparent for anticipation layer, and to work with average values over these periods. Then, the consumption of household equipments is scheduled for all anticipation periods in order to guarantee that it is possible to solve constraints globally over any anticipation period. The optimization algorithm requires predictions as mentioned in (Yoseba et al., 2003). The scheduling process of n thermal-air environments is achieved for a period s = na a . For an anticipative period a,j = [j a , (j + 1) a ], the following notations are used: Index i stands for a thermal-air environment Index j stands for the j th anticipative period Ti,j stands for the temperature of a thermalair environment i during anticipative period j Tjout stands for the outside temperature during anticipative period j i,j stands for the average user comfort for an air-thermal environment i Pj stands for the maximal available power during anticipative period j Pi stands for the maximum power consumption of an air-thermal environment i Pi,j stands for the average consumed power of an air-thermal environment i during period j

Pi,j Pj , j
i=1

(1)

In an anticipative period can be xed once.

a,j ,

the power set point

3.2 Thermal constraints Anticipation requires a relevant thermal air environment model. (Lagonotte, 1999) and (Fraisse et al., 2002) have proposed precise models of a room. Nevertheless, given the importance of uncertainties in predictions, which may cover periods of several hours, the simple thermal dynamic models presented in (Andersen and Klaus, 2000; Nathan, 2001) has been preferred: t
a,j ,

Ci

1 dTi (t) = Pi,j (Ti (t) Tjout ) dt Ri

(2)

Ci is the heat capacity of environment i. Ti (t) is the room temperature, Pi,j is the average thermal power generated by the heater during period a,j . It also corresponds to electric power consumed by the heater. Ri represents total thermal resistance between the considered environment and outdoors. The thermal incidence of the other environments and of the solar radiation are considered as perturbations but, they could also be taken into account with a more precise model. Each environment contains a electric heater equipped with a closed loop controller. The regulation is based on on/o modulations: consumption switches alter natively from 0 to the heaters full power Pi . From

the anticipative layer, this controller requires an average power Pi,j to reach the required temperature Ti,j+1 for anticipative period a,j . Therefore, the continuous model (2) is discretized according to a sampling time a : Ti,j+1 = e
a ( R C ) i i

Ti,j
a ( R C ) i i

+ Ri (1 e

)Pi,j
i i

+ (1 e

a ( R C )

)Tjout

(3)

It yields that to reach the temperature Ti,j+1 from Ti,j , the average power required is: Pi,j = Ti,j+1 e
a ( R C ) i i

Ti,j )

Ri (1 e

a ( R C ) i i

1 out T Ri j

(4)

Fig. 1. The relation between the | P M V | and the indoor temperature In this paper, only indoor temperature is taken into account; other elements like outdoor temperature, humidity, users clothes and mean air velocity are assumed to be constant: T out = 5o C,M = 80 (W m2 ),W = 0,Va = 0.15 (m/s),PaH2 O = 1000 P a,Icl = 0.5 Clo. The relation of P M V and Ta is illustrated in gure 1. Comfort has also to be anticipated using the ISO 7730 standard. For an anticipation period a,j , the comfort, based on the predict mean vote (6), is dened by: i,j =
set set | P M V (Ti,j ) | + | P M V (Ti,j+1 ) | 2

In order to reduce the dimension of the search space, the domain of possible values for temperature is discretized Ti,j dom(T ) into nd domains. In xing the acceptable limit of the predict mean vote (PMV) 2 , two thresholds characterizing acceptable indoor temperatures can be deduced: T min Ti,j T max . The discretized domain of air temperatures satises: dom(T ) = {T min + k T max T min ; k 0 . . . nd 1} nd (5)

(7)

3.3 Comfort constraints and criteria Comfort is a subjective feeling, which is dicult to assess. (B. W. Olesen, 2002) and (Candas, 2000) have proposed the ISO7730 thermal comfort standard. This standard has been established from experimental results obtained in polling thousands of persons in USA and in Scandinavia. A predict mean vote (PMV) index, which predicts how the human feel comfort, has resulted from this study. This index belongs to the interval [3, 3] where: 0 means neither hot nor cold +/-1 means slightly warm (+) or slightly cold () +/-2 means heat (+) or cold () +/- 3: very hot (+) or very cold () An mean vote (MV) is obtained while making average of the judgments by all those polled. The function of PMV(Predict Mean Vote) is determine following ISO7730 standard (Candas, 2000): P M V (Ti,j ) = (0.303e0.036M + 0.028) [(M W )3.05.103 {57736.99(M W )PaH2 O } 0.42{(M W ) 58.15} 1, 7.105 M (5867 PaH2 O ) 0.0014M (34 Ti,j )
4 4 3.96.108 fcl (Tcl Ti,j ) fcl hc (Tcl Ti,j )] (6)

4. SCHEDULING PROBLEM The static scheduling process search the {Ti,j } satisfying the constraints, i 0, . . . , n 1, j 0, . . . , na 1: Power constraints (1) Temperature constraints (5) Ti,j dom(T ) Heater capacity constraints 0 Pi,j Pi Behavioral constraint (4) To minimize the average i,j :
n1 na 1

J=
i=0 j=0

i,j

(8)

4.1 Design of a search graph The problem is represented as a node network denoted G. This network has n levels, the level Lj corresponds to the period a,j . In level j, let the node Nj,k represents a possible state of indoor air temperatures during period a,j . Each node is represented by a set of temperatures denoted Tj,k :

P M V 1 for instance

path to return from a level to a precedent level. Moreover, the weights of arcs are positive. For these reasons, an adaptation of Bellman-Fords algorithm that provides optimum solutions, can be used. A node Nj,k in the search graph has a set of precedent nodes or predecessors, denoted P re(Ni,k ), and a set of subsequent nodes or successors, denoted Succi,p . The principle of this algorithm is to mark all nodes in the graph network. A node is marked if and only if all its predecessors have been marked. The label lj,k of each node Nj,k corresponds to the summation of arc criteria of the shortest path from the initial node in level L0 to this node. Fig. 2. Example of graph for 2 environments Tj,k = {val(Ti,j ) dom(T ), i {0, . . . , n 1}} (9) The nodes in the same level represent all the possible combinations of temperatures in the different environments during a,j . So, the number of nodes in a level j, denoted nlevel is an expoj nential function of the number of environments: nlevel nn . j d An arc Aj,k,l connects node Nj,k to Nj+1,l between two adjacent levels. In order to connect these nodes, power constraints (1) and heater capacity constraints (4) have to be satised. The rst one guarantees that the heating system does not overpass the maximal available power to pass from state Tj,k to state Tj+1,l . The second one guarantees that the heaters are able to provide the required powers to pass from state Tj,k to state Tj+1,l according to model (4). As an example, consider a house with only one environment. If the heating system can not heat the environment from 16o C to 25o C in one anticipative period, the arc will not be created. Each arc linking Nj,k to Nj+1,l is weighted by the criterion:
n1

The time complexity of this algorithm is equal to: na (n2nd ). The space complexity is equal to: na (nnd ).

5. RESULTS An illustrative example based on two thermal air environment is presented in this section. Each environment is equipped with a 1kW electrical heater. Thermal parameters are: C = 0.025kW h/o C, R = 40kW/o C. The outdoors temperature is invariant: T out = 5oc and the initial temperature is T0,0 = 20o C. The static scheduling process covers 90 minutes, the anticipative period a is xed to 15min. Domain of the temperature sets is delimited by Tmin = 15o C, Tmax = 30o C, and the discretization is nd = 15. In order to reshape the load curve, i.e. the consumption prole, energy provider inuence the customer by load shifting strategies (G. Thomas, 2000), which encourage customers to move their energy consumption from peak to o-peak times. In this example, the maximal consumed power is equal to zero in the peak period corresponding to [15(min), 75(min)]. The solution corresponding to the optimal comfort, obtained by Bellman algorithm, is shown in the gure (3).The solution is: 1st thermal-air environment,(23; 24; 20; 17; 21; 21o C), the corresponding powers are:(0.47; 0.049; 0 ; 0; 0.68; 0.32(kW )). For the second environment, temperatures are: (23; 24; 20; 18; 18; 21o C) using power :(0.47; 0.049; 0; 0; 0.26; 0.59kW ). Before the power becomes unavailable, the anticipative system increases the temperature in order to accumulate energy into thermal environment. The user feel warm during a while, but then, he does not feel too cold afterwards. The results obtained when only the protection mechanism is enable, are presented in gure 4. Protection

J(Aj,k,l ) =
i=0

i,j

(10)

Figure 2 presents the outlines of a graph dedicated to two environments.

4.2 Adaptation the shortest path algorithm A solution is a path from level L0 to level Lna 1 . The best solution minimizes criterion (8) i.e. it corresponds to the search of the shortest path from the initial node in level L0 to a node in level Lna 1 . It is a well known problem (Cherkassky et al., 1994). The graph G contains no circuit because the direction of the arcs are always from level Lj to level Lj+1 . Consequently, there is no

thanks to a scheduling method. Even if the presented example is simple, the proposed DSM system can be also extended to buildings and possibly to power management of big regions.

REFERENCES Andersen and Kaae Klaus (2000). Modelling the heat dynamics of a building using stochastic dierential equations. Energy and Building. B. W. Olesen, K.C. Parsons (2002). Introduction to thermal comfort standard and to the proposed new version of en iso 7730. Energy and Building 34, 537548. Boivin (1995). Demand side management -the role of the power utility. Pattern Recognition 28(10), 14931497. Candas, Victor (2000). Confort thermique. Technique de lingenieurs. Cherkassky, Boris V., Andrew V. Goldberg and Tomasz Radzik (1994). Shortest paths algorithms: Theory and experimental evaluation. In: SODA: ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms. Duy Long, Ha, Ploix S., Zamai E. and Jacomino M. (2005). Control of energy consumption in home automation by ressource constraint scheduling. In: The 15th International Conference on Control System and ComputerScience. Bucharest, Romania. Fraisse, G., C. Viardo, O. Lafabrie and G. Achard (2002). Development of a simplied and accurate building model based on electrical analogy. Energy and buildings 1430, 114. G. Thomas, Bellarmine (2000). Load management techniques. In: Southeastcon 2000. Proceedings of the IEEE. pp. 139 145. Lagonotte, P. (1999). Analyse de la qualit e de mod`les nodaux rduits ` laide de la e e a mthode des quadriples. International Joure o nal of Thermal Science 38, 5165. Nathan, Mendes (2001). Building thermal performance analysis by using matlab/simulink. In: Seventh International IBPSA Conference. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Penya, Yoseba K. (2003). Last-generation applied articial intelligence for energy management in building automation. In: Proceedings of the 5th IFAC International Conference on Fieldbus Systems and their Application. pp. 7983. Peter, Palensky and Posta Ratko (1997). Demand side management in private home using lonworks. Wacks, Kenneth P. (1991). Utility load management using home automation. IEEE transaction on Consumer Electronics 37, 168174. Wacks, K.P (1993). The impact of home automation on power electronics. In: Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition. pp. 3 9.

Fig. 3. Result in load shifting DSM strategy

Fig. 4. Protection mechanism only mechanism deactivate the heater when power is no more available. Temperature falls down to 15o C instead of 18o C when anticipative mechanism is enable (gure 3).

6. CONCLUSION In this paper, an approach that manages power consumption in home automation is presented. This power management system has three layers: the anticipative mechanism search the optimal power consumption for predicted events using an adaptation the Shortest path problem. The protection layer is an emergency control mechanism that both guarantees that the power constraints are never violated and that the user comfort remains at a good level. Then the equipment layer handles perturbations due to outdoors stochastic events and user actions. The proposed solution makes possible for the private households to automatically adjust their consumption in order to satisfy power constraints and consequently to participate into a DSM system. The solution also maximizes the comfort according to ISO7730 standard. The results show that it is possible to signicantly improve power management in private household

Yoseba, Penya, Palensky Peter and Lobashov Maksim (2003). Requirement and prospects for consumers of electrical energy regarding demand side management. 3 Internationale Energiewirtschaftstagung an der TUWien IEWT03 pp. 101102.