Utility-Based Real-Time Estimation of Appliance Dispatching Cost for Residential Energy Management

Increasing researches have taken residents’ satisfaction into consideration when design residential energy management approaches to achieve maximal potential benefits from a DR program. The current user satisfaction models are dichotomous and cannot support precise satisfaction expression. Additionally, the models only focus on the satisfaction generated from appliance operation and the electricity expense reduction, which can also improve user satisfaction, is generally ignored. Inspired by utility theory in economics, a unified framework of user satisfaction is proposed. A novel concept called power utility is proposed to elaborately describe user satisfaction related to appliance operation and power utility function is presented to support the calculation of power utility. Then, the dispatching cost function is developed to describe the cost caused by appliance rescheduling in demand response, which is in the sense of user satisfaction. Furthermore, some achievements in behavioral economics such as prospect theory and temporal discounting effects are introduced in the framework to provide more realistic description of user satisfaction. Finally, the case studies provide a fresh prospective of behavioral economics to explain the customer’s different preference for various appliances in DR program.