A survey of smart home energy conservation techniques

Abstract

Smart homes are equipped with easy-to-interact interfaces, providing a more comfortable living environment and less energy consumption. There are currently satisfactory approaches proposed to deliver adequate comfort and ease to smart home inhabitants through infrared sensors, motion sensors, and other similar technologies. However, the goal of reducing energy consumption is always a significant concern for smart home stakeholders. A detailed discussion about energy management techniques might open new leads for advanced research and even introduce more ways to improve existing methods since a summary of effective energy conservation techniques are helpful to get a quick overview of the state-of-the-art techniques. This review study aims to provide an overview of previously proposed techniques for energy conservation and energy-saving recommendations. We identify various critical features in energy conservation techniques, i.e., user energy profiling, appliance energy profiling, and off-peak load scheduling to perform a comparative analysis among different techniques. Then, we explain various energy conservation techniques, describe common and rare evaluation metrics, identify several techniques for realizing synthetic smart home energy consumption datasets, and provide a statistical analysis of the existing literature. The survey finally points out possible research directions which might lead to new inquiries in energy conservation research.