Elsevier

Energy

Volume 203, 15 July 2020, 117769
Energy

Genetic-programming-based multi-objective optimization of strategies for home energy-management systems

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2020.117769Get rights and content
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open access

Highlights

  • A novel energy-management method based on optimized decision trees is presented.

  • Genetic programming is applied for cost and green objectives optimization.

  • Superiority over timetable-based approaches is shown theoretically and experimentally.

  • Resulting strategies can be run on low-cost hardware.

  • Users define relevance of cost vs green objectives.

Abstract

Home energy-management systems can optimize performance either by computing the next step dynamically – online, or rely on a precomputed strategy used to introduce the next decision – offline. Further, such systems can optimize based on only one or several objectives. In this paper, the multi-objective optimization of offline strategies for home energy-management systems is addressed. Two approaches are compared: the common timetable-based versus our approach based on decision trees. The timetable-based strategy is optimized using a multi-objective genetic algorithm, while the tree-based strategy is optimized using multi-objective genetic programming. As a result, a set of rules that comprise the trees for efficient management of an energy system is generated automatically. First, the approaches are addressed theoretically, with the finding that the tree-based approach is more powerful than the timetable-based approach. Second, the performance of the tree-based approach is compared with the performance of the timetable-based approach and manually defined strategies in an experiment involving real-world data. A performance increase of up to 17% in terms of the cost objective was confirmed for the tree-based approach. This is achieved without changing the user habits, i.e., there is no need of having to adapt the appliance usage to the energy-management system.

Keywords

Home energy-management system (HEMS)
Genetic programming
Multi-objective optimization
Tree-based strategy
Timetable-based strategy
Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL)

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