The emergence of smart devices and smart appliances has highly favored the realization of the smart home concept. Modern smart home systems handle a wide range of user requirements. Energy management and energy conservation are in the spotlight when deploying sophisticated smart homes. However, the performance of energy management systems is highly influenced by user behaviors and adopted energy management approaches. Appliance scheduling is widely accepted as an effective mechanism to manage domestic energy consumption. Hence, we propose a smart home energy management system that reduces unnecessary energy consumption by integrating an automated switching off system with load balancing and appliance scheduling algorithm. The load balancing scheme acts according to defined constraints such that the cumulative energy consumption of the household is managed below the defined maximum threshold. The scheduling of appliances adheres to the least slack time (LST) algorithm while considering user comfort during scheduling. The performance of the proposed scheme has been evaluated against an existing energy management scheme through computer simulation. The simulation results have revealed a significant improvement gained through the proposed LST-based energy management scheme in terms of cost of energy, along with reduced domestic energy consumption facilitated by an automated switching off mechanism.
Keywords: appliance scheduling; energy management; least slack time; load balancing; smart home.