Toward visualising and controlling household electrical appliances

Abstract

Energy consumption is a vital component in day-today life. Visualising energy consumption, recommending energy conserving strategies and, controlling the appliances are some of the widely considered means to motivate and/or to help end-users at household to conserve energy. However, the conventional energy visualisation applications have certain drawbacks, such as lack of energy consumption location, lack of controlling appliances based on energy-saving recommendations, etc. To overcome those, this research would accomplish a simulation model by designing the following: (i) visualisation engine, to visualise household electricity consumption, (ii) recommendation engine, to provide energy-saving recommendations to the end-users, (iii) control engine, to control the household appliances based on the recommendations, and (iv) integrate visualisation, recommendation and control engines. This research uses a combination of user-centred design and iterative development methods. Successful implementation of these objectives would provide a significant contribution to this inter-disciplinary research area and would serve to achieve higher energy savings.