An event driven Smart Home Controller enabling consumer economic saving and automated Demand Side Management Alessandro Di Giorgio ⇑ , Laura Pimpinella Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica, Automatica e Gestionale ‘‘A. Ruberti’’, Via Ariosto 25, 00185 Roma, Italy article info Article history: Received 3 August 2011 Received in revised form 24 January 2012 Accepted 12 February 2012 Available online 13 March 2012 Keywords: Local energy management system Time of Use Tariff Demand Side Management Energy efficiency Event driven control abstract This paper proposes the design of a Smart Home Controller strategy providing efficient management of electric energy in a domestic environment. The problem is formalized as an event driven binary linear programming problem, the output of which specifies the best time to run of smart household appliances, under a virtual power threshold constraint, taking into account the real power threshold and the forecast of consumption from not plannable loads. The optimization is performed each time the system is trig- gered by proper events, in order to tailor the controller action to the real life dynamics of an household. This problem formulation allows to analyze relevant scenarios from consumer and energy retailer point of view: here overload management, optimization of economic saving in case of Time of Use Tariff and Demand Side Management have been discussed and simulated. Simulations have been performed on rel- evant test cases, based on real load profiles provided by the smart appliance manufacturer Electrolux S.p.A. and on energy tariffs suggested by the energy retailer Edison. Results provide a proof of concept about the consumers benefits coming from the use of local energy management systems and the rele- vance of automated Demand Side Management for the general target of efficient and cost effective oper- ation of electric networks. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction In Europe, 20% share of energy production from renewable gen- erators and 20% of energy efficiency have been fixed as target to be met by 2020 [1]. At the same time, energy retailers have begun to offer innovative energy tariffs to final customers, as a consequence of the ongoing unbundling of many national electricity systems [2]. The subscription of proper energy contracts will be the strategic tool by which customers will be allowed to join energy programs aiming to optimize their behaviours in energy consumption and, lastly, to achieve an efficient management of the whole electric network. More specifically, the induction of a desired behaviour by means of an incentives/penalties scheme (Demand Side Man- agement – DSM) is the way by which clusters of active customers will contribute to:  reduction of peak consumption and, consequently, reduction of the number of operating traditional and pollutant power plants, thus decreasing the related operational and maintenance costs;  integration into the distribution grids of Distributed Generators (DGs) and Micro Generators (MGs), being them exposed in many cases to generation volatility;  distribution network stability and, consequently, reduction of power supply interruptions and grid operational and mainte- nance costs. The increasing share of renewable energy with volatile electric- ity feed-in and the growing power demand will require reliable generation and demand forecasts. Recent works [3,4] have recog- nized deviations from forecasts as a fundamental factor that can cause unbalancies between demand and supply; as a consequence a growing need for positive and negative balancing power is ex- pected for the coming years [5]. DSM can provide the required flex- ibility and stability to the power system, being it characterized by a reduction of energy consumption and/or a shift of energy demand to a later time. It is expected to compete with traditional power plants, controllable renewable energy sources and storage devices in spot and tertiary balancing markets. Based on the exchange of proper price and volume signals with market actors, DSM policies are able to address the following two short-term aspects:  provision of positive tertiary reserve capacity by decreasing demand when the electricity system falls short of providing suf- ficient capacity;  provision of negative tertiary reserve capacity by increasing demand if an oversupply occurs. 0306-2619/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.apenergy.2012.02.024 ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: digiorgio@dis.uniroma1.it (A. Di Giorgio), pimpinella@dis. uniroma1.it (L. Pimpinella). Applied Energy 96 (2012) 92–103 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Applied Energy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/apenergy