A closed-loop home energy automation system via power provisioning

Abstract

This paper designs a visionary home energy automation system based on virtual energy provisioning (VEP) concept. VEP is a novel demand side management concept inspired by the supply chain theory. In manufacturing industry, the concept of “make-to-order” allows the customers to provide advance demand information so that the products can be produced and delivered on time. Leveraging this concept, this paper proposes an on-line energy management system enabling the utilities and the consumers to exchange demand information. In other words, the end consumers are able to provide advance demand data to the utility company via the Internet. The utility provider, after aggregating consumers' future demand, can determine an optimal distribution scheme. Such a closed-loop control scheme ensures energy reliability and system stability. We developed a prototype system to test this energy provisioning concept in a laboratory setting. Distributed data processing model is adopted to accelerate the processing speed based on B-spline functions.