Decentralized energy management for a group of heterogenous residential customers

Collaborative demand management of multiple homes and effective local renewable energy integration in a smart and active secondary distribution network are key to reduce their energy bills. Assuming home energy manager module assisted smart metering and bi-directional communication infrastructure between aggregator and customers. This paper presents a modified hybrid differential evolution (DE) based solution strategy for in-home energy management, with the objectives of minimizing customers' energy usage cost and discomfort; and game theoretic approach for across the homes in a heterogenous residential neighborhood. The users' privacy is maintained by communicating just the optimum consumption scheduling profile to the given tariffs without giving details of the each appliance consumption schedules. Simulation results based on real world data shows that proposed decentralized approach can reduce the total energy cost, overall peak-to-average ratio across-homes, and individual's electricity cost and discomfort minimization with minimum iterations.