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An Intelligent Controller For Smart Home

The document summarizes an intelligent controller for smart homes that was proposed in a conference paper. The controller monitors and controls individual home appliances through smart plugs (I-plugs) connected to each device. The I-plugs measure energy consumption and can turn appliances on/off via commands from the controller. The controller collects data from the I-plugs and sends it to a user interface via a local hub and internet connection. The user interface is a mobile app and webpage that allows users to view energy use of devices and control appliances manually or allow automatic control based on energy tariffs.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
117 views4 pages

An Intelligent Controller For Smart Home

The document summarizes an intelligent controller for smart homes that was proposed in a conference paper. The controller monitors and controls individual home appliances through smart plugs (I-plugs) connected to each device. The I-plugs measure energy consumption and can turn appliances on/off via commands from the controller. The controller collects data from the I-plugs and sends it to a user interface via a local hub and internet connection. The user interface is a mobile app and webpage that allows users to view energy use of devices and control appliances manually or allow automatic control based on energy tariffs.

Uploaded by

Manuel Guijarro
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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2016 Intl. Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI), Sept.

21-24, 2016, Jaipur, India

An Intelligent Controller for Smart Home


Vishnu S Babu, Ashwin Kumar U, Priyadharshini R, Krithika Premkumar and Nithin S.
Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering
Amrita School of Engineering, Coimbatore
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amrita University, India
[email protected]

Abstract— Home Area Network (HAN) forms an integral part of Things (IoT) along with RFID technologies were introduced
of the Smart Grid technology providing a smarter Solution to the for home automation [8]. Home Energy Management (HEM)
energy crisis. This article proposes a remote interface controller algorithm is proposed in [9], with renewable sources. Smart
for Smart Homes as a part of Home Automation and Demand Home Protocol (SHP) developed in [10] enables the
Side Management. The intelligent controller submits the user connectivity between smart home devices and appliances.
with the individual energy consumption profiles of the appliances
at his home on an android mobile application providing the user A continuous monitoring system for each appliances and
with dual appliance control (on/off) options: manual or the disconnection of devices which are not in use for a
automatic. The former requires manual control of the appliances particular time is introduced in [12].The application of
while the latter lets the controller make the decision based on Renewable Energy Source and a system based on the
dynamic tariff rates using Fuzzy Logic. This system being user evaluation of User preferences and time of usage are discussed
friendly can be adopted for the Smart Grid and Smarter homes. in [13]. In [14] a smart home management system based on the
previous history of energy usage of the device and it uses
Keywords— Smart Grid; HAN; Intelligent controller renewable energy source if energy usage is large in the history
of device. Using mobile application, [15] customer can able to
I. INTRODUCTION monitor the energy usage of each devices, compare the energy
Energy crisis is one of the biggest problems that the world usage between devices. The automatic controls of individual
is facing. The socio-economic impacts of energy crisis are appliance were not considered here. Gathering Real time
hefty [1][2]. Consumers may face rolling blackouts/power energy usage information [6] of individual appliances can
outages during insufficient supply [1][3]. The concept of Smart reduce the overall energy usage to a great extend. From the
Grid [3][4] was introduced to alleviate these issues associated existing literature [6][11][12][15] it is evident that intelligent
with generation, transmission and distribution of electric control of devices is necessary based on real time energy usage
power. The Home Area Networks (HAN) in Smart Grid could of the devices to meet the demand side energy without
be crucial in delivering smarter homes [3] and thus promoting affecting customer comfort level.
energy conservation. Each consumer can take part in this by This article proposes an intelligent controller for HAN
reducing power consumption in whatever way they can. But which can monitor and control individual appliances. The
the hindrance often faced is that the consumers are unaware of communication possibilities offered by IoT [16] and ZigBee
the energy consumed by different appliances in their home, and [5][6] are used here. The controller is intelligent to control the
which among these contribute more to the overall loads automatically based on dynamic tariff considering user
consumption. Consumers would be unsuccessful in reducing preferences. The user interface is through an Android mobile
their energy bill even though the usage of some loads has been application and a webpage.
cut down. This may be due to an appliance that was least
suspected to consume a lot of energy has been doing just the
II. OVERVIEW OF THE PROPOSED SYSTEM
opposite due to poor maintenance, faulty equipments, etc.
Users might not be aware of this and hence their effort to The Home Energy Management System consists of
reduce their consumption might go in vain. intelligent plug points called I-plug, a local hub and a user
interface - mobile application. Each appliance is connected to
A solution to this is to monitor and control the appliances in the power supply through I-plug. These nodes consist of an
an intelligent manner, which would give a considerable amount energy measurement unit, control to switch the appliance
of information needed to carry out conservational measures. A on/off and a ZigBee transceiver to transmit and receive data
review of the existing literature revealed similar researches, from the local server. The local hub is also a transceiver
carried out in a diverse context. A home energy control system communicating the data to the internet. The user interface, a
design which provides intelligent service for users using smart mobile application, which is connected to the internet, displays
sensors, energy management technologies etc. were discussed the energy consumption of each device, overall consumption
in [5]. Device control and energy management was proposed and also its equivalent cost as per the tariff. Fig. 1 depicts the
specifically for heating and air conditioning units. The design system block diagram.
and implementation of Smart home management system
making use of ZigBee communication network with a new The primary function of I-plug is to measure the energy
routing protocol was proposed by Han et al. [6]. The energy consumed and transmit the data to the local server. They are
saving concept discussed in [7] minimizes the domestic energy also responsible for turn on/off the appliance if a control signal
waste and can be adapted according to the user habits. Internet is given. The energy measurement unit consists of a potential

978-1-5090-2029-4/16/$31.00 @2016 IEEE 2654


2016 Intl. Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI), Sept. 21-24, 2016, Jaipur, India

transformer, current transformer and other sub circuits like zero and current multiplied over a cycle is calculated. The obtained
crossing detectors, level shifter. Energy consumed is measured value is multiplied with timer value and sent to local hub
with the help of a microcontroller, dsPIC30F4011. The output through serial communication. The control switch is a relay
of both the potential transformer and current transformer are which is connected in series with the load. The signal from the
clamped using a level shifter circuit such that the signal is microcontroller is given to the driver circuit of the relay.
between 0 to 5V as this is the input voltage range of the Analog Depending on the type of command (ON/OFF) the necessary
to Digital Converter (ADC) in microcontroller. Fig. 2 explains action of make or break the circuit is carried out. Local hub is
the internal architecture of I-plug. an Arduino microcontroller with an Ethernet shield. I-plug
sends the energy consumed for one cycle. Arduino receives
System voltage is taken as the reference. The those data and calculate the total energy consumed by the load.
microcontroller is configured for external interrupt. The output Arduino sends this data periodically, 5 Sec, to an online
of the potential transformer is given to the zero crossing which database. Arduino reads the required status (on/off) of the load
generates an interrupt to the microcontroller signaling it to start from the database and transmit the data to node through
the simultaneous ADC conversion. Time period of a single UART.
voltage cycle is calculated by time interval between alternate
interrupts to the microcontroller using a timer. Simultaneous A webpage is hosted in 000webhost.com. It comes with an
sampling of current and voltage is done at 0.58 MHz and inbuilt MySQL database. A SQL table is created with three
instantaneous values are multiplied and accumulated. columns, namely Appliance, Energy consumed, preference and
status. The data to and from local hub are stored in this
database. A webpage displaying Energy consumed, status and
a manual option to switch on/off the appliance are created
using HTML accessing MySQL database through PHP script.
An android application is created using an online webpage to
mobile application converter tool. Fig. 3 shows the prototype
of I-plug. The energy consumption I-plug module is in the
range of milli Watts.

Fig. 1. Block diagram of the intelligent home controller

Fig. 3. Prototype of I-plug

III. INTELLIGENT HOME CONTROLLER


To make the proposed system intelligent, a Fuzzy logic
controller was developed, the fuzzy controller takes the
dynamic tariff signal and user preferences for each appliance as
the input. It is assumed that Smart Meter provides dynamic
tariff signals to the Home controller. The controller then
decides which all loads should be controlled in such a way that
the user preferences are met and energy bill is reduced.
Dynamic tariff signals from smart meter were emulated; these
signals were generated based on the system Frequency.
TABLE I shows the dynamic tariff signals considered. The
user preference for loads were considered in the range one to
five, One being low and five being the highest preference.
Fig. 2. Block diagram of I-plug TABLE II shows the customer preferences. Based on the
dynamic tariff signals, customer preferences and load selection
fuzzy member ship were functions generated as shown in Fig
Interrupt generated at the end of one cycle of voltage
4.
waveform stops the ADC conversion and the mean of voltage

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2016 Intl. Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI), Sept. 21-24, 2016, Jaipur, India

TABLE I. FREQUENCY AND CORRESPONDING TARIFF RATE


Frequency Range (F)(Hz) Dynamic Tariff (D)(Rs./unit)

49.00 ” F < 49.81 5•D>3


(High Tariff)

49.81 ” F < 49.99 3•D>1


(Medium Tariff)

49.99 ” F < 50.2 1 > D> 0


(Low Tariff)

(c) Load selection


TABLE II. CONSUMER PREFERENCES CONSIDERED Fig. 4. Fuzzy member ship functions
Consumer Preference (R) Fuzzy Linguistics
IV. EVALUATION OF INTELLIGENT CONTROLLER
The proposed system based on I-plug was designed and
1” R<2 Low (L)
developed. I-plugs were able to measure the energy
2” R<3 Medium (M) consumption of appliances the modules were tested and
calibrated using a Fluke-435 series 2 power quality analyzer.
3” R<4 High (H) Three such modules were developed with ZigBee
communication. The intelligent algorithm for load selection
4” R<5 Very High (VH)
based on Fuzzy logic was also deployed.
Three I-Plugs and three Loads were considered for the
evaluation, default priority of the Loads were in the order of L1
>L2 >L3. The system was tested with all possible customer
preferences and tariff rates. A subset of the results is shown in
TABLE III. During high tariff rate, the intelligent controller
selected only one load having high customer preference.
Similarly, during medium tariff and low tariff condition the
controller selected two and three loads respectively. When the
user gives same priority to more than two loads, the algorithm
selects the load with highest default priority.

TABLE III. INTELLIGENT CONTROLLER -LOAD SELECTION


Dynamic Customer Preferences Selected
(a) Dynamic tariff Tariff For Loads Loads
L1 L2 L3
L M VH L3
High Tariff L VH H L2
H M L L1
VH H M L1
L M VH L3,L2
Medium
L VH H L2,L3
Tariff
H M L L1,L2
VH H M L1,L2
L M VH L3,L2,L1
Low Tariff L VH H L2,L3,L1
H M L L1,L2,L3
VH H M L1,L2,L3
(b) Consumer preference
V. CONCLUSION:
A user-friendly home energy monitoring system which
updates the user on real time energy consumption of individual
appliances and also allows remote control (on/off) of these
appliances from any location was designed and developed. The
developed system enables users to define preference for

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2016 Intl. Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI), Sept. 21-24, 2016, Jaipur, India

appliances and thus reduce user intervention in controlling [16] M.-C. Shie, P.-C. Lin, T.-M. Su, P. Chen, and A. Hutahaean, "Intelligent
loads with respect to dynamic tariff. One major application of energy monitoring system based on ZigBee-equipped smart sockets,"
2014 International Conference on Intelligent Green Building and Smart
this system could be optimized management of energy Grid (IGBSG), Apr. 2014.
consumption. The scheme integrates a fuzzy controller through [17] LEM, “Voltage Transducer LV 20-P,” LV 20-P datasheet,Rev.9.
which loads are automatically controlled based on dynamic [Online]. Available: http://www.ceipsa.com/datasheet/LV20-P.pdf.
tariff and user preferences. This technology, apart from Accessed: Aug. 20, 2016.
allowing utilities to easily access energy consumption profiles [18] M. T. Inc, "DsPIC30F4011 - 16-Bit - Microcontrollers and digital signal
of its customers, can be helpful to consumers in efficient controllers," 1998. [Online]. Available:
management of consumption leading to energy conservation. http://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/en/dsPIC30F4011. Accessed:
Aug. 20, 2016.
Demand side management being the need of the hour, utilities
can benefit from such technologies.

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