A Flexibility Home Energy Management System to Support Agreggator Requests in Smart Grids
Energy flexibility will play a key role in the proper functioning of energy systems, introducing a set of benefits to all involved stakeholders and changing the shape of electricity markets as we know them. It is expected that new players with different interests will emerge in this context. Particularly, the aggregators might allow end-users to be aware of their consumption flexibility value, or merely facilitate consumer’s participation, for instance through the use of demand response. To this end, a prompt system response allowing the interaction between aggregators and residential users is needed. Therefore, the so-called Home Energy Management System (HEMS) becomes an active tool to communicate end-users with aggregators, performing the necessary changes in the consumption profiles in benefit of all involved parts. In this paper, a model with the objective of achieving a match between the flexibility required by an aggregator and the flexibility offered by residential users through the HEMS capability of shifting specific appliances is proposed. The model is then solved using a well-known swarm intelligence algorithm, the particle swarm optimization (PSO). An illustrative example of how the model is optimized using PSO, re-scheduling appliances to meet a flexibility curve, is presented. After that, a case study with 15 appliances based on real profiles of home devices is solved showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach to procure flexibility.