Dealing with the stochastic home energy management problem

This paper focuses on the home energy management problem faced by a smart prosumer equipped with photovoltaic panels and a storage system. Some of the home appliances (the shiftable ones) can be controlled in that the consumer may specify an operating time window within the load should be turned on. The inherent uncertainty affecting the main model parameters (i.e. loads and production from renewable) is explicitly accounted for by adopting the two-stage stochastic programming modeling paradigm. The solution provides the prosumer with the optimal scheduling of the shiftable loads and the using profile of the storage system that guarantee the minimum expected energy procurement cost, taking into account the prosumers comfort. Preliminary results, collected on three different categories of residential prosumers, have shown the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of cost saving and the advantage related to the use of a stochastic programming approach over a deterministic formulation.