A Participatory Design Approach for Energy-Aware Mobile App for Smart Home Monitoring

It is generally recognized that our behaviours affect the environment. However, it is difficult to correlate behaviour of an individual person to large-scale problems. This is usually due to insufficient ergonomy of available tools. The main cause is that most of user-awareness tools available are technology-centered instead of user-centered. In this paper, we present a participatory design approach we followed to design and develop an energy-aware mobile application for user-awareness on energy consumption for Smart Home monitoring. To engage end-users from the early design stages, we conduct two on-line surveys and a focus group involving about 630 people. Results allowed on identifying functional requirements and guidelines for mobile app design. The purpose of this research is to increase user-awareness on energy consumption using tools and methods required by users themselves. Furthermore in this paper, we present the technological choices that drove our implementation of an energy-aware application based on prosumers’ requirements

A Distributed Software Solution for Demand Side Management with Consumer Habits Prediction

Future smart grids will open the marketplace to novel services for grid management, such as Demand Side Management (DSM). To achieve energy saving in distribution systems, DSM aims at modifying load profile patterns of electricity demand by involving actively customers. In particular, residential customers can participate to this service by shifting their energivourous appliances (e.g. washing machine and dishwasher). In this paper, we present a novel DSM service to manage a day ahead balance. It exploits a human-in-the-loop approach to provide suggestions on shifting their appliances based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm combining both i) the probability density function of each customer’s appliance usage and ii) the cost function. To assess our DSM service, we present our experimental results performed in a realistic environment where we simulated a virtual population of about 1′000 families