Integrating User Preference Into Improved Home Appliance Scheduling

Primary Question – How can smart appliance networks integrate human preference to enhance appliance scheduling? To deal with user preference variability, where the physical network interacts with human behavior, the most effective method is a flexible Graphical User Interface (GUI), or dashboard. In this work a dashboard is developed to make a more flexible model, this dashboard can account for variability in load preference, goal preference and appliance specifications, allowing consumers to plan loads on their specific network of household appliances in order to schedule a preferred time and evaluate the costs of certain load timing, given the desire to minimize the cost of electricity, avoid exceeding a peak load with minimal deviations from the user preferred schedule. As a result, uncertainty due to users is mitigated, such that only uncertainty in the load cycles themselves had to be managed, and that management could be done with greater robustness and computational efficiency. Consequently, this provides a model for developing more computationally efficient and robust scheduling patterns for household appliances. In this paper, household appliances are treated as an interdependent network to find satisficing solutions for timing loads to minimize electric cost, peak load, and deviation from the preferred time of scheduling.