A Multiagent System Approach to Scheduling Devices in Smart Homes

Demand-side management (DSM) in the smart grid allows customers to make autonomous decisions on their energy consumption, helping energy providers to reduce the energy peaks in load demand. The automated scheduling of smart devices in residential and commercial buildings plays a key role in DSM. Due to data privacy and user autonomy, such an approach is best implemented through distributed multiagent systems. This paper makes the following contributions: (i) It introduces the Smart Home Device Scheduling (SHDS) problem, which formalizes the device scheduling and coordination problem across multiple smart homes as a multi-agent system; (ii) It describes a mapping of this problem to a distributed constraint optimization problem; (iii) It proposes a distributed algorithm for the SHDS problem; and (iv) It presents empirical results from a physically distributed system of Raspberry Pis, each capable of controlling smart devices through hardware interfaces, as well as larger scale synthetic experiments.