Nearly-optimal control for energy, thermal, and storage loads with energy disaggregation monitoring: A case of residential management for the elderly

Abstract

The increase in the ageing of the population calls for advanced monitoring and actuation systems for the smart control and management of elderly households that should manage to optimise multi-objective control problems. This study proposes a state-of-art approach, based on Approximate Dynamic Programming, that tackles multiple challenges, aiming to maximise the energy efficiency, the electricity cost reduction, the user comfort, and the load monitoring of a typical Greek residency (simulated in EnergyPlus), including both controllable and uncontrollable loads, an energy storage system, and power generation units. The article presents the various simulated loads, pricing schemes under Greek regulations and variety of control strategies that are co-ordinately used to minimise the defined objective functions in contrast to the current state-of-the-art approaches. The latter either focus on single objective problems or use simpler iterative and often limited to specific variables, approaches for multi-objective control. Finally, the presented results provide insights for the optimal and safe residential management and validate the performance of the proposed control strategy in comparison with alternative demand response strategies, offering improved performance by 20% in terms of energy efficiency, cost reduction, and thermal comfort.