Development of an Internet of Things based Electrical Load Management System

Abstract

This paper presents an interoperable automation system that uses the Internet of Things technology for remotely controlling and monitoring electrical appliances connected to the power supply system. Transducers located inside the socket outlets collect vital information regarding the status of the electrical network. This information includes the AC consumption, appliance status, and information from the RFID tags. The sensor and actuators are integrated with a small microcontroller known as NodeMCU. This microcontroller is equipped with an onboard Wi-Fi transceiver thus data is processed and reliably transmitted from each socket outlet to a single board computer, known as the Raspberry Pi. The received information is processed and displayed on a standard web interface hosted by the LINUX based computer. The web interface has a variety of interactive widgets enabling the user to 'talk' to the appliances in real-time. Communication among the IoT devices is handled through a lightweight application layer protocol known as the MQTT protocol. Another unique feature of the presented system is its ability to identify various power quality issues that frequently occur in most electrical networks. The automation system contributes to the conservation of energy by increasing the awareness of the consumer on their daily electrical energy usage.