A Study on Modeling of Users a Load Usage Pattern in Home Energy Management System Using a Copula Function and the Application

This paper addresses the load usage scheduling in the HEMS for residential power consumers. The HEMS would lead the residential users to change their power usage, so as to minimize the cost in response to external information such as a time-varying electricity price, the outside temperature. However, there may be a consumer’s inconvenience in the change of the power usage. In order to improve this, it is required to understand the pattern of load usage according to the external information. Therefore, this paper suggests a methodology to model the load usage pattern, which classifies home appliances according to external information affecting the load usage and models the usage pattern for each appliance based on a copula function representing the correlation between variables. The modeled pattern would be reflected as a constraint condition for an optimal load usage scheduling problem in HEMS. To explain an application of the methodology, a case study is performed on an electrical water heater (EWH) and an optimal load usage scheduling for EHW is performed based on the branch-and-bound method. From the case study, it is shown that the load usage pattern can contribute to an efficient power consumption.