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This paper presents a data-driven approach that leverages reinforcement learning to manage the optimal energy consumption of a smart home with a rooftop solar photovoltaic system, energy storage system, and smart home appliances. Compared to existing model-based optimization methods for home energy management systems, the novelty of the proposed approach is as follows: (1) a model-free Q-learning method is applied to energy consumption scheduling for an individual controllable home appliance (air conditioner or washing machine), as well as the energy storage system charging and discharging, and (2) the prediction of the indoor temperature using an artificial neural network assists the proposed Q-learning algorithm in learning the relationship between the indoor temperature and energy consumption of the air conditioner accurately. The proposed Q-learning home energy management algorithm, integrated with the artificial neural network model, reduces the consumer electricity bill within the preferred comfort level (such as the indoor temperature) and the appliance operation characteristics. The simulations illustrate a single home with a solar photovoltaic system, an air conditioner, a washing machine, and an energy storage system with the time-of-use pricing. The results show that the relative electricity bill reduction of the proposed algorithm over the existing optimization approach is 14%.

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This paper presents a hierarchical deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method for the scheduling of energy consumptions of smart home appliances and distributed energy resources (DERs) including an energy storage system (ESS) and an electric vehicle (EV). Compared to Q-learning algorithms based on a discrete action space, the novelty of the proposed approach is that the energy consumptions of home appliances and DERs are scheduled in a continuous action space using an actor–critic-based DRL method. To this end, a two-level DRL framework is proposed where home appliances are scheduled at the first level according to the consumer’s preferred appliance scheduling and comfort level, while the charging and discharging schedules of ESS and EV are calculated at the second level using the optimal solution from the first level along with the consumer environmental characteristics. A simulation study is performed in a single home with an air conditioner, a washing machine, a rooftop solar photovoltaic system, an ESS, and an EV under a time-of-use pricing. Numerical examples under different weather conditions, weekday/weekend, and driving patterns of the EV confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of total cost of electricity, state of energy of the ESS and EV, and consumer preference.

The adoption of smart meters may bring new privacy concerns to the general public. Given the fact that metering data of individual homes/factories is accumulated every 15 minutes, it is possible to infer the pattern of electricity consumption of individual users. In order to protect the privacy of users in a completely de-centralized setting (i.e., individuals do not communicate with one another), we propose a novel protocol, which allows individual meters to report the true electricity consumption reading with a pre-determinted probability. Load serving entities (LSE) can reconstruct the total electricity consumption of a region or a district through inference algorithm, but their ability of identifying individual users’ energy consumption pattern is significantly reduced. Using simulated data, we verify the feasibility of the proposed method and demonstrate performance advantages over existing approaches.

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