Electricity Consumption Constraints for Smart-home Automation: An Overview of Models and Applications

The global energy consumption challenge can largely be addressed by adoption of smart-home autonomous agents, allowing adaptive scheduling of electronic devices – for household and businesses alike. The realization of this smart architecture necessitates the agents need to know their decision space, in order to schedule different devices according to their individual constraints. Some of these constraints can be set by the owner, for example, timelines for washing machine or charging electric vehicles, not necessitating a smart agent. However, most appliances are subject to physical constraints, for example, washing machine being non-interruptible, and consequently, the modeling of the decision space is non-trivial. This paper gives an overview of smart-agent based models for different electric devices and appliances using their individual non-trivial energy consumption constraints, and proposes solutions for appliance optimization and scheduling.