IoTivity Cloud-Enabled Platform for Energy Management Applications

Abstract

In developing countries today, population growth and the penetration of higher standard of living appliances in homes has resulted in a rapidly increasing residential load. In South Africa, the recent rolling blackouts and electricity price increase only highlighted this reality, calling for sustainable measures to reduce overall consumption and peak load. The dawn of the smart grid concept, embedded systems, and ICTs have paved the way for novel Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) design. In this regard, the Internet of Things (IoT), an enabler for intelligent and efficient energy management systems, is the subject of increasing attention for optimizing HEMS design and mitigating its deployment cost constraints. In this work, we propose an IoT platform for residential energy management applications focusing on interoperability, low cost, technology availability, and scalability. We addressed the backend complexities of IoT Home Area Networks (HAN) using the Open Consortium Foundation (OCF) IoTivity-Lite middleware. To augment the quality, servicing, reduce the cost, and the development complexities, this work leverages open-source cloud technologies from Back4App as Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) to provide consumers and utilities with a data communication platform within an experimental study illustrating time and space agnostic “mind-changing” energy feedback, Demand Response Management (DRM) under a peak shaving algorithm yielded peak load reduction around 15% of the based load, and appliance operation control using a HEM App via an Android smartphone.