Leveraging evolutionary algorithms for dynamic multi-objective optimization scheduling of multi-tenant smart home appliances

In parallel to optimizing energy consumption within houses, users' comfort is increasingly considered as an essential success criterion for automated smart home solutions. From the user perspective, balancing trade-offs between energy consumption and users' comfort when scheduling home appliances is a challenging task mainly within dynamic context (energy price, budget, user preferences, energy source, etc). To address this challenge, this paper has modeled appliances scheduling as a dynamic constrained multi-objective optimization problem and have leveraged a recently introduced dynamic evolutionary algorithm for the problem resolution. Moreover, there are typically multiple inhabitants in the same home who often share context-aware applications with various individual preferences which are likely to be conflicting. We propose a new comfort function to support multi-user conflictual preferences. Our experimental results have shown that our approach has a confirmed advantage on the user comfort while coping dynamically with the context changes.