A simulation-optimization approach for the household energy planning problem considering uncertainty in users preferences

The power supply is one of the basic needs in modern smart homes. Computer-aid tools help optimizing energy utilization, contributing to the sustainable goals of modern societies. For this purpose, this article presents a mathematical formulation to the household energy planning problem and a specific resolution method to build schedules for using deferrable electricity that can reduce the cost of the electricity bill while keeping user satisfaction at a satisfactory level. User satisfaction has a great variability since it is based on human preferences, thus a stochastic simulation-optimization approach is applied for handling uncertainty in the optimization process. Results over instances based on real-world data show the competitiveness of the proposed approach, which is able to compute different compromise solution accounting for the trade-off between these two conflicting optimization criteria.