  This paper proposes a multiobjective home energy management unit (MO_HEMU) to
balance the electricity payment and thermal discomfort of a household by
properly scheduling devices in a time varying price environment. The thermal
discomfort is measured by the deviation of indoor and hot water temperature
from the users ideal temperature. The home devices include solar Photovoltaics,
a battery storage system, deferrable, and thermal appliances. The proposed
MOHEMU is formulated as a dynamic program and a method based on the
approximated dynamic programming is used as the scheduling algorithm. The
developed method, called multistep look ahead algorithm, is an iterative
algorithm that overcomes the curse of dimensionality of the exact DP by
choosing a decision based on a limited number of stages ahead. The
effectiveness of the proposed model is investigated through numerical
simulations. The proposed MO_HEMU enables customers to find the desired trade
off between electricity payment and a discomfort level.
