  It is anticipated that an uncoordinated operation of individual home energy
management (HEM) systems in a neighborhood would have a rebound effect on the
aggregate demand profile. To address this issue, this paper proposes a
coordinated home energy management (CoHEM) architecture in which distributed
HEM units collaborate with each other in order to keep the demand and supply
balanced in their neighborhood. Assuming the energy requests by customers are
random in time, we formulate the proposed CoHEM design as a multi-stage
stochastic optimization problem. We propose novel models to describe the
deferrable appliance load (e.g., Plug-in (Hybrid) Electric Vehicles (PHEV)),
and apply approximation and decomposition techniques to handle the considered
design problem in a decentralized fashion. The developed decentralized CoHEM
algorithm allow the customers to locally compute their scheduling solutions
using domestic user information and with message exchange between their
neighbors only. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed
CoHEM architecture can effectively improve real-time power balancing.
Extensions to joint power procurement and real-time CoHEM scheduling are also
presented.
