Title: MinNet: toward more intelligent smart home energy management systems with fewer sensors

Authors: Jiuyang Tang; Guoming Tang; Kui Wu

Addresses: Science and Technology on Information Systems Engineering Laboratory, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China ' Department of Computer Science, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC V8P 5C2, Canada ' Department of Computer Science, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC V8P 5C2, Canada

Abstract: The smart home technology has attracted considerable attention for decades. Nowadays, as the drastic increase of home energy consumption, efficient home energy management system (HEMS) has become a major building block. Aiming at building an easy-to-deploy intelligent HEMS, we design MinNet to (i) monitor the states of individual home appliances using the minimum number of power sensors and (ii) provide occupancy states of a house/room with inference intelligence. In detail, we use convenient plug-in power sensors to construct a wireless sensor network for data collection and establish an analytical framework based on the power model of appliances. By solving a carefully-designed optimisation problem, we find the minimum number of sensors to decode the states of appliances from their aggregated power and infer the occupancy states of the house/room. We implement MinNet in a house and validate its accuracy in appliance states monitoring and occupancy inference.

Keywords: HEMS; home energy management systems; WSNs; wireless sensor networks; power monitoring; intelligent energy management; smart energy management; energy consumption; power sensors; house occupancy states; home appliances; smart homes.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2016.076727

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2016 Vol.20 No.4, pp.252 - 263

Received: 22 Aug 2015
Accepted: 03 Dec 2015
Published online: 23 May 2016 *

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