User-Centric” Energy Management System

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I. INTRODUCTION
THIS paper describes Energy@home project [1], an Italian initiative of ENEL, Electrolux, Indesit Company and Telecom Italia aimed at enhancing the energy efficiency of the entire house system. The project envisions a communication infrastructure that enables provisioning of Value-Added Services (VAS) based upon information exchange related to energy usage, energy consumption and energy tariffs in the Home Area Network (HAN) [3]. The proposed home scenario includes several actors: i) the Electronic Meter, responsible for providing certified metering data


II. GENERAL ARCHITECTURE OF ENERGY@HOME
The Energy@home general architecture is reported in Fig. 1. The dotted area (that includes both the HAN and the HN) represents the user’s home domain, where all actors, Smart Appliances, Home Gateway, Smart Info and Customer Interfaces, can cooperate through some communication mechanism (e.g. ZigBee and WiFi). All the depicted interfaces are logical ones and could be implemented through one or more communication technologies.

A. Smart Appliances
Smart Appliances represent an evolution of the current standard white goods: the new smart devices feature connectivity towards both the home environment and the smart grid, and embed an enhanced local intelligence in order to manage innovative services. Hereunder, some of their possible new functionalities are reported:
- display to the customer information on their energy consumptions (e.g. used energy, instant power, etc.);
- dispatch in the HAN information on their energy consumptions (e.g. used energy , instant power, etc.);
- autonomously adapt their behavior according to information on energy consumptions coming from the house. (e.g. reduce their load when global house consumptions goes beyond a threshold, etc.);


B. Smart Plugs
The Smart Plugs can actively participate to in home monitoring and control activities. To this purpose, smart plugs are able to collect metering data and implement on/off control on simple plugged energy loads, other than Smart Appliances


The customer interfaces could:
- display information on energy usage like instant power, historical data, contractual information and similar, from the whole house (coming from the Smart Info) and from every single smart appliance. The level of details and graphical layout of their user interface is freely defined by every device;
- transmit control message to Smart Appliances to request a modification of their behavior;
- configure Smart Appliances to modify their power consumption profile (e.g. a personal computer used to configure a thermostat to activate the controlled load only in certain time slots).