Optimal Planning of Smart Home Technologies

The smart home will bring many challenges. One of the challenges is how to design a smart home that satisfies the needs of the residents in a cost-effective way. This paper addresses this challenge by proposing an optimization model to define the optimal portfolio of smart home technologies and electricity tariffs that minimize the overall investment and operation costs of the house owner. The smart home technologies include electric vehicle charging stations, battery energy storage systems, home energy management systems, and photovoltaic systems. A case study of a real house in Portugal was used to evaluate the performance of the planning optimization model. The numerical results show that the optimization model selects the combination of smart home technologies and electricity tariffs that best meets the needs of the household owner in a cost-effective way.