Home Energy Management System (HEMS)
INESC home Energy Management System is enables flexibility provision from home, working with diverse appliances such as washing machines or heat pumps. Its main functions are monitoring and data analytics on energy usage; optimal scheduling of flexible assets to provide demand side flexibility support.
The HEMS runs on a microservice architecture with several containerized modules to support different functionalities. These technologies support a wide range of software tools and communicate via cloud-to-device or cloud-to-cloud-to-device implementations using standardised protocols (e.g. MQTT) as well as semantic representations.
New trends have been observed in HEMS due to technological maturity:
- The growth in non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) techniques is now making it possible to collect energy consumption data down to the level of appliances.
- Due to the pervasive availability of sensors, it has become easier to collect different dimensions of data, including ambient temperature, humidity, and lighting, that can be integrated by EM systems to provide more contextual information and thus increase their effectiveness.
- Cloud computing and mobile platforms have made it possible to perform large-scale analytics on sensor data and offer advanced real-time feedback to the consumers.
- The growing popularity of social networks, has made it easier to incorporate comparative and persuasive features into EM systems to motivate behavioral changes in consumers.
InescTec will adapt its energy management system to a context where hybrid storage systems are combined.
The system will evolve to a modular and computer-effective cloud-based solution, in order to integrate semantically interoperable services, such as forecasting, energy flexibility, optimization.
