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Abstract—The Internet of Things (IoT) has brought increased sensor data. The number of available sensing and actuation
sensing, monitoring and actuation capabilities to several domains devices has grown rapidly in the last few years [6], promising
including residential buildings. Residential energy management a truly pervasive sensing and actuating environment. In addi-
methods can leverage these capabilities and devise smarter
solutions. This requires processing and reasoning data con- tion, ubiquitous connectivity and cloud storage have largely
stantly generated by various IoT devices. In this paper, we use mitigated the primary research issues in the pervasive sensing
a hierarchical system model for IoT-based residential energy fields. Reliability of communication and storage allows us to
management, that includes a general purpose functional unit to focus on the application layer: IoT applications operate in
drive data processing and reasoning. We apply this hierarchy a world of changing inputs and available compute nodes as
to represent the electricity delivery structure from the utilities
to individual residences. Our system captures additional data sensors and devices enter and exit an application’s domain.
generated by various devices as user context and uses this context The raw data in these applications will go through several
to determine user flexibility towards energy management. Our levels of abstraction, combination, or distillation to produce a
experiments show that modeling user context brings over 14% high-level description of the environment (and its users) with
improvement in energy flexibility prediction accuracy and 12% discrete, semantic states called context. Discrete, high-level
reduction in annual grid energy cost.
context facilitates intuitive reasoning at the cost of raw data
precision, and can be reused across applications.
I. I NTRODUCTION
These context-aware Internet of Things applications are
Residential energy automation has gained significant at- ideally suited for determining user behavior for the residen-
tention over the last years due to potential savings applied tial smart grid: their main goal is to leverage the available
over millions of houses. Previous studies leverage reschedula- data to drive automated actuation, such as in smart envi-
ble appliances, energy storage devices and renewable energy ronments, distributed microgrids, or user-centric automation.
sources (e.g. solar, wind) to increase the energy efficiency They operate on dynamically changing, ontologically-defined
of residential domain. Although actual instrumentation is data called context data whose type, range, and sources are
very important to demonstrate the real applicability of the specified in an interface. Current context-aware applications
automation solutions, high-level models are also essential for are still end-to-end implementations tightly coupled to the
testing different scenarios and scaling up the results to several initial infrastructure and platforms, where each application
hundreds/thousands of houses before real deployment [1]. maintains its own data and user interactions. As the number
Most existing studies use static models and over-optimistic and heterogeneity of sensing devices and compute nodes
improvements - using the additionally available data as ground available to each application changes, these implementations
truth. However, this data is 1) not always readily available, and adapt poorly without complete redesign. Smaller, simpler func-
2) strongly tied to the behavior and preferences of users [2] tional units that provide intermediate steps towards an overall
[3]. The advent of the Internet of Things (IoT)—a collection application can alleviate scalability issues. Additionally, the
of sensors and actuators backed by the existing and growing state of the art [7] [8] places the burden of processing in
Internet infrastructure [4]—can provide the context needed for black-box applications. This is particularly inefficient when
user-driven residential energy automation. In this work, we multiple applications need to process the same data using
aim to use this additional user context to determine individual similar computation (e.g. both workplace automation and
appliance and house energy flexibility. Our approach includes home security can infer a user’s location and occupancy
modeling, training, and generating this context information in from various data sources in the same way). Furthermore,
an efficient and accessible way. reliance on application-specific code squanders the potential
Pre-IoT work in ubiquitous sensing still envisioned a level for designing and reusing general-purpose machine learning
of compatibility and control over the sensors in the systems for multiple context-aware applications.
[5] and applications that used a manageable amount of raw This paper identifies a novel approach to context-aware res-
idential energy management problem using a general-purpose Objects Application processing Objects
Translator
Context Engine HIgh-level abstracted context
for a given output context variable. We apply this idea towards Context extraction
User Display
the residential smart grid as a distributed, hierarchical context- Manual feedback
Translator
aware application. We use heterogeneous data from different Context Engine
Context extraction
residences and user activities and scale the system up with User
Translator
Raw context Context Engine Control signals
ing the potential for complexity and overhead reduction. We Smart actuation
Building Building
then demonstrate the impact of the addition of user context,
Data Plane
with over 14% improvement in energy flexibility prediction
accuracy and 12% reduction in annual grid energy cost.
II. R ELATED W ORK Fig. 1. Context engine framework: hierarchical and modular representation
TABLE I
T HE FOUR DIFFERENT HOUSE TYPES RETRIEVED FOR THE CASE STUDY,
WITH THEIR CONSTITUENT COMPONENTS .
TABLE III
AVERAGE MEAN ABSOLUTE ERROR (MAE) FOR EACH CONTEXT ENGINE
IN SINGLE - STAGE AND SEQUENTIAL APPROACHES
TABLE IV TABLE V
F LEXIBLE APPLIANCE SCHEDULING C OST SAVINGS AND APPLIANCE DEADLINES OF ORACLE KNOWLEDGE ,
STATIC FLEXIBILITY AND PREDICTED FLEXIBILITY
Appliance Flexible Schedule
Washer Up to 12 hr before predicted deadline Static Oracle Predicted
Case
Dryer Up to 12 hr before deadline, within 2 hr of washer Schedule Schedule Schedule
Dishwasher Within 6 hr after predicted deadline Base Appliance
$594.98 $594.98 $532.31
Annual Grid Cost
Rescheduled Appliance
$487.92 $514.23 $469.64
Annual Grid Cost
HomeSim, introduced by [1], with the context engine approach Cost Savings ($) $107.06 $80.75 $62.67
Cost Savings (%) 18% 14% 12%
to manage residential grid energy consumption and cost. In our Appliance
90% 100% 100%
previous work, we quantify the ability for smart appliances Deadlines Met (%)
to be rescheduled through awareness of time-of-use retail
energy prices [1] . While we previously used static flexibility
information for each appliance (i.e. a fixed threshold for • Predicted schedule: This is the real-time schedule deter-
each appliance instance), we now have the ability to generate mined solely by the output of context engine predictions.
individual flexibility predictions using context engines (see In addition to predicted flexibility, since our context
Figure 2). To restate, we use historical appliance start times engine only predicts one interval in advance, we only
to generate a flexibility range for each appliance (see Table have the ability to use the remaining intervals of the
II). We use HomeSim’s reschedulable appliance scheduler, de- flexibility range after the predicted appliance start time.
scribed in [1], which allows us to use our predicted flexibility To generate the energy and flexibility predictions for each
and energy consumption to rescheduling flexible appliances. appliance, we obtain the output of the Flexible Interval and
The goal is to move appliances to intervals where they Energy Prediction context engines (Figure 2), respectively, for
can be more cheaply utilized. We use the outputs of our all subsequent intervals of the current day and pass this data
context engines, the predictions of energy consumption and into HomeSim. We assume knowledge of 24-hour time-of-use
flexibility, to generate new schedules for flexible appliances. (TOU) pricing in order to facilitate rescheduling. This is data
We compare the results against having full knowledge of the that is typically available on the wholesale sector from various
appliance’s consumption data and the assumed flexibility that ISOs [28] [29] [30]. As retail energy integrates TOU pricing
was determined by historical usage. as well, we expect to see similar forecasts.
Table V has three schedules (as described above) and we
calculate the savings for each schedule individually as the
difference between the base cost (row 1) and the cost with
reschedulable appliances (row 2) of the respective schedule.
We obtain 12% annual cost savings for the rescheduled appli-
ances using individually predicted flexibility values for each
appliance. We further compare this to having oracle knowledge
of all appliances and their flexibilities, the ground truth that
we used earlier to train the context engines, which generates
Fig. 5. Appliance flexibility ranges for: static, oracle, and predicted. 14% cost savings. The static schedule presented in the previous
section (Table IV) demonstrates a further 4% savings, at 18%
Figure 5 illustrates the three cases we investigate: electricity cost saved.
• Static schedule: assumes a fixed schedule for each Our predicted schedule’s energy consumption is within 89%
appliance. This is derived from Table IV, which is pro- and 96% of the oracle scheduler for the base energy cost and
vided by our previous work [1]. This case does not take rescheduled appliance energy cost respectively, and there is
into account differences derived from historical appliance only a 2% difference between our savings and that of the
traces. For example, the washer and dryer flexibility oracle schedule. The error in energy cost is partly due to
ranges are 12 hours and dishwasher flexibility range is energy prediction error, and partly because upon predicting
6 hours. These ranges can also be seen as deadlines, i.e. an appliance’s start time, we only have until the rest of the
the appliance usage instances should be accommodated flexibility interval from the predicted start time to schedule
before the end of the flexibility interval. the appliance (the red interval in Figure 5). The oracle,
• Oracle schedule: uses the ground truth derived from his- however, has a priori knowledge of the day’s schedule, and can
torical usage as the flexibility interval for each appliance. reschedule an appliance anytime within the flexible interval,
This varies from appliance to appliance and from house to even before the original start time (the green interval in Figure
house. Since we are using the actual energy and flexibility 5). Finally, the original static flexibility case study (see Table
traces, we also have the benefit of foresight: determining IV) yields a further cost reduction primarily because of the
the full range of the flexibility interval before and after increased range of flexible intervals (the blue interval in Figure
the actual appliance instance’s start time. 5). The static flexibility interval for the clothes washer is
First International Workshop on Mobile and Pervasive Internet of Things'17
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