Smart home power management system for electric vehicle battery charger and electrical appliance control

This article presents a power management system (PMS) designed for smart homes aiming to deal with the new challenges imposed by the proliferation of plug-in electric vehicles (EVs) and their coexistence with other residential electrical appliances. The PMS is based on a hybrid wireless network architecture composed by a local hub/gateway and several Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and Wi-Fi sensor/actuator devices. These wireless devices are used to transfer information inside the smart home using the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol. Based on the proposed solution, the current consumption of the EV battery charger and other residential electrical appliances are dynamically monitored and controlled by using a configurable algorithm, ensuring that the total current consumption does not cause the tripping of the home circuit breaker. An Android client application allows the user to monitor and configure the system operation in real-time, a developed Wi-Fi smart plug permits to measure the RMS values of current of the connected electrical appliance and change its state of operation remotely, and an EV battery charger may be controlled in terms of operating power according to set-points received from the Android client application. Experimental tests are used to evaluate the quality of service provided by the developed smart home platform in terms of communication delay and reliability. An experimental validation for different conditions of operation of the proposed smart home PMS concerning the power operation of the EV battery charger with the proposed control algorithm is also presented.