Implementing home energy management system with UPnP and mobile applications

The power grid is undergoing a revolution and modernization through integrating information and communication technologies with the power system and also installing new electricity system technologies. Distributed controls in a certain self-reliant power-service area are critical means to modernize the power system to be the Smart Grid. Since the self-reliant area is assumed to perform physical and/or expert-engineered operations that should be integrated, monitored and controlled by a computational cyber system, the area is one area where the cyber and physical systems interact together, and home in the Smart Grid is one example for the area. In this paper, we propose a home energy management system (HEMS) to realize full automation combining computational and physical systems in a home area, which excludes operator-based control and management. The proposed system is designed to be built on the Universal Plug-and-Play architecture, and it can be accessed remotely over the Internet via mobile applications that work in Apple iPhone. Based on the design, we actually implemented the HEMS and constructed an empirical testbed that consists of networked personal computers, home appliances, and portable wireless devices. With the empirical testbed, we verified the monitoring and controlling functions of the HEMS. Additionally we carried out an extensive simulation study with the measured data of power consumption and the collected data of power price in order to see the effectiveness of the proposed HEMS. We also discuss about some limitations and challenges that we have encountered in designing and implementing the HEMS.