Development of Fuzzy Logic Based Approach for Consumer Side Management in Smart Home

Smart Grid environment requires the active participation of the consumer in terms of energy saving and shift the loads to off-peak period balance the power between source and load. In this situation, consumers' preferences, self-adjusting, and self-scheduling of the operation of home appliances drawing more attention because of difficulties in their manual adjustment. An autonomous scheduler is needed for the home appliances to function automatically to save cost and energy but without compromising the comfort level of the consumer. This work proposes a fuzzy logic based intelligent approach for providing suggestions to the consumer through shifting their electricity demands to off-peak hours. The proposed fuzzy logic-rule-based approach consists of time slices, bidding cost, power rating, duration of total operating hours of the individual loads per day, preferable and non-preferable time slots of loads as inputs, and ON/OFF of the loads as the output. Here, household appliances are categorized as base loads and schedulable loads. Consumer comfortability, cost, and demand responses are the three-optimization variables taken into account for the design of a fuzzy-based load management scheduler. The simulation result shows that the proposed system provides support to the consumer's decisions on controllable load management, considering the consumer's comfortability and rescheduling to achieve possible economic benefits.