Personalized Residential Energy Usage Recommendation System Based on Load Monitoring and Collaborative Filtering

Residential demand response (DR) is recognized as a promising approach to improve grid energy efficiency and relieve the network stress. Many studies have been conducted to design home energy management systems that directly schedule and control the household appliances. Distinguished from existing works, this article proposes a personalized recommendation system (PRS) to learn energy-efficient household appliance usage experiences from a large scale of residential users, and recommends suitable appliance usage plans to users while taking their lifestyles into account. The proposed system is based on a collaborative filtering recommendation technique. The PRS first classifies a collection of users as "highly responsive users" and "less responsive users" based on their DR degree analysis. Then, for each less responsive user, the PRS infers the user's lifestyle from usage profiles of nonshiftable appliances and finds out users who have similar habits with the target user from the set of highly responsive users. Based on this, the PRS evaluates the lifestyle similarity between the target user and each smart user, aggregates the appliance usage experiences of highly responsive users, and makes appliance-use recommendations to the target user. Experiments based on a residential data simulator "SimHouse" are designed to validate the proposed system.