Optimizing the Power Consumption of Household Appliances Using IoT

Introduction

It is important to ensure reliable and uninterrupted power to the appliances which is a major concern for successful operation of power systems. Ideally, the appliances should always be provided constant power and frequency sources. That means the voltage and the frequency must be in a range so that the appliances may operate reasonably (IEO, 2016). In a result, the order of the system become relatively enlarged and the complexity is risen. Consequently, the analysis of dynamic stability and the control design of these large interconnected systems become difficult (Fischer, 2013).

The energy consumption in buildings is increasing world-wide over the years. According to the International Energy Outlook 2016 Reference case, the buildings' consumption increases 1.5/year on average world-wide from 2012 to 2040 (IEO2016). With the growing urbanization, approximately 80% people of the world get advantages from electric power. In the US, a typical household energy consumption is approximately 11,700 kWh each year. Besides, in France, UK and China, it is 6,400kWh, 4,600 kWh and 1,300 kWh, respectively. The average household consumption is around 3,500 kWh globally (Crystal, 2015). The countries with below 5% people living under poverty level have four times higher energy consumption. In Europe, the energy consumption is 33% of the world's consumption, where it is 26% in North America. The efficiency of energy usage is only 39% approximately based on the report of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) (Fischer, 2013). Hence, almost 60% of energy is wasted, which is more than half of energy.

The energy consumption in residential sector is almost 50% in many developing countries. In Bangladesh, for example, the residential buildings consumed about 47% of the total energy in the last few decades, where the agriculture and industrial sectors consumed around 45% (Masuduzzaman, 2012). Nevertheless, a significant amount of power is wasted in residential and commercial buildings due to the lack of proper utilization of energy. The use of Internet of Things (IoT) may reduce the wastage of total energy by utilizing the building consumption effectively.

During the past few decades, a number of studies has been accomplished for the management of energy consumption in buildings. It is shown in a variety of research works that pick power reduction can manage energy consumption in smart buildings efficiently (Adika & Wang, 2014; Costanzo, Zhu, Anjos & Savard, 2012; Pipattanasomporn, Kuzlu & Rahman, 2012; Yao, Costanzo, Zhu & Wen, 2014). The household appliances are scheduled by applying a mixed integer programming approach in Agnetis, Pascale, Detti and Vicino (2013). A greedy approach has been proposed to find the optimal start time of the appliances in Chavali, Yang and Nehorai (2013), which eventually reduce the energy consumption of the appliances. Another greedy approach was developed in O’Brien and Rajagopal (2015) that reduces the pick consumption by considering known and unknown load demands. A nonlinear model was developed in Setlhaoloa, Xia and Zhang (2014) to schedule household appliances, that reduces the electricity cost by shifting the load consumptions. In Sadid, Abobakr and Zhu (2017), peak consumption has been reduced by developing two different scheduling algorithms.