Section: Application Domains

Smart grids

With the smart grid revolution, house energy consumption will play a significant role in the energy system. Home users are indeed responsible for a significant portion of the world’s energy needs portion, but are totally inelastic with respect to the market (i.e. the energy demand does not follow the price of the energy itself). Thus, the whole energy generation and distribution system performance can be improved by optimizing the house energy management. Those problems are concerned by multiple objectives such as cost and users’ comfort, and multiple decision makers such as end-users and energy operators. We propose a home automation system that can monitor appliance scheduling in order to simultaneously optimize the total energy cost and the customer satisfaction.

The key challenge is to propose new optimization models and new hybrid optimization algorithms to the demand side management of smart grids in a context of uncertainty and in the presence of several conflicting objectives. Those complex optimization problems are also characterized by the presence of both continuous and discrete variables.