Demand Side Management of Smart Homes Using OpenHAB Framework for Interoperability of Devices

Smart homes incorporate connectivity concepts to enhance comfort, security and maintain low operating costs of connected devices. It provides flexibility and controllability of devices across different communication protocols. New technological advancements have spawned the need for device interoperability within the smart home vendor-specific ecosystem. These new developments have pioneered the proliferation of frameworks such as AllJoyn and OpenHAB to address issues of interoperability. In most developing countries, the hourly unit price of electricity is constant throughout the day as compared to developed countries where it varies at different hours of the day. It is therefore relevant to build demand side energy management systems that can help individuals save cost whilst using electricity to meet a prepaid budget efficiently. This paper presents the design, development and deployment of demand side response for smart homes energy management systems which allows interoperability among home appliances and devices. It incorporates both web and mobile applications for device controllability and visualization. It allows users to input their prepaid budget and schedule the use of energy within a smart home across all connected devices using energy-sharing-based algorithm. Testing of the developed prototype proved successful, effective and very efficient for home energy management system.