Appliance Flexibility Analysis Considering User Behavior in Home Energy Management System Using Smart Plugs

The home energy management system (HEMS) plays an important role in enabling residential customers to participate in demand response (DR) programs autonomously via appliance-level dispatch with smart plugs, and the flexibility analysis could help the HEMS to dispatch appliances efficiently without harming user's comfort level. This paper presents a bottom-up method to obtain the flexibility of appliances. With the use of smart plugs in the HEMS, the type of the appliance attached to each smart plug is inferred with consideration of measurement uncertainty as well as user behavior. Then, the flexibility of an appliance is analyzed based on the extrapolated power consumption of the appliance as well as the owner's usage behavior. In the case study, the types of appliances recognized for individual smart plugs as well as the corresponding flexibilities are used as reference for appliance dispatching in the HEMS under various DR applications. The case study demonstrates the performance of the proposed appliance load monitoring method and the application of the proposed flexibility analysis.