  Electricity usage is a major portion of utility bills and the best place to
start lowering them. An effective home energy management approach is introduced
to decrease customers' electricity bills by determining the optimal appliance
scheduling under hourly pricing based demand response (DR) strategies. The
proposed approach specifically addresses consumer comfort through acceptable
appliance deferral times, within which their consumption can be shifted from
the normal schedules. Electric vehicles (EVs), with vehicle to grid (V2G) and
vehicle-to-home (V2H) abilities, Energy storage systems (ESS), and Renewable
Energy Resource as a distributed generation are considered at the end-user
premises to improve the energy management efficiency. A mixed-integer linear
programming (MILP) framework is implemented to solve the proposed problem.
Numerical results show that the proposed approach can reduce customers'
electricity bill without sacrificing their comfort and fully exploit EVs and
ESS capacities.
