A customized transition towards smart homes: A fast framework for economic analyses

• Published in: Applied energy Vol. 262; p. 114549
• Main Authors: de Souza Dutra, Michael David, da Conceição Júnior, Gerson, de Paula Ferreira, William, Campos Chaves, Matheus Roberto
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Ltd 15.03.2020
• Subjects: Economic analysis; Energy management system; Interior point; Optimization; Smart home; Economic analysis; Interior point; Energy management system; Optimization; Smart home
• ISSN: 0306-2619; 1872-9118
• DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2020.114549

•General framework for the optimal net present value of smart appliance investment.•A Tree Algorithm with Interior Point speedup the framework in days.•Forty important economic cities in Brazil taken as case studies using real data.•Payback and return on investment measures are not enough for economic analysis.•Full set of results available online. Smart homes allow optimized energy usage, allowing households to reduce electricity bills or even make profits. By 2020, 20% of all households in Europe will be expected to become smart homes. Although smart homes seem to be the future for homes, many customers have the perception that a transition from current homes to smart ones is unprofitable. Adopting a smart home concept requires investments for which the households desire a positive return. A question in this context is the following: for a given household, when and/or what set of home appliances/technologies should be acquired so that the investment made by householder has a positive financial return? The available tool to answer that question can be time-consuming from a practical perspective. Based on our previous work, this paper proposes a framework to help the transition from current houses to smart homes considering customized electricity usage and economic measures. A tree algorithm is developed to decrease the time needed by an economic analysis of each possible acquisition combination of smart appliances or equipment for a given user. The proposed framework is tested on 40 cases covering all Brazilian capital cities, whose results are available online and may be used directly as an approximation for economic analyses. An example of one case is described in detail. Results show that the proposed tree algorithm is able to reduce days of CPU time to solve the problem and Net Present Value should be used as an economic measure to answer the aforementioned question.