This paper analyzes a consumption scheduling mechanism for domestic appliances within a home area network. The aim of the proposed scheduling is to minimize the total energy price paid by the consumer and to reduce power peaks in order to achieve a balanced daily load schedule. An exact and computationally efficient mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation of the problem is presented. This model is verified by several problem instances. Realistic scenarios based on the real price tariffs commercially available in the Czech Republic are calculated. The results obtained by solving the optimization problem are compared with a simulation of the ripple control service currently used by many domestic consumers in the Czech Republic.

Vehicle safety remains a topic of major interest, and diverse assistance systems are implemented that focus primarily on analyzing the immediate vicinity of the car and the driver’s control inputs. In this paper, by contrast, we emphasize understanding the driver’s control performance via obtaining valuable data and relevant characteristics. To acquire the data, we employed an in-house-designed, laboratory-built vehicle driving simulator. This simulator exploits the Unreal Engine 4 framework to deliver a high level of realism. The fact that the actual designing and associated processes were materialized through our own efforts has brought advantages such as simplified data acquisition, possibility of creating custom scenarios, and modification of the virtual elements according to our specific needs. We also developed an application to analyze the measured data from the perspective of control theory, establishing a set of parameters that provided the basis for an early version of a driver performance index indicator.

We consider the problem of implementing security algorithms into embedded systems deployed in automation applications. Such systems are typically built on embedded microcontrollers with limited resources and as hardware changes may not be possible or convenient, the software based cryptography is a suitable solution. In this paper we present results of performance benchmarks of different software-implemented symmetric cryptography algorithms on 8 and 16-bit microcontroller platforms. The contribution of the work is in comparing performance of different algorithms, embedded microcontroller platforms, effects of optimizations and different implementations.

We present the conceptual design of a collective control scheme for appliances within a smart home. Based on the relevant energy acquisition procedures, three appliance groups are defined, modeled, and completed with an energy storage as well as a generator using renewable sources. At the following stage, a mixed quadratic optimization problem is presented, with the solution consisting in a time plan to regulate the operation of the individual devices. Importantly, the paper also proposes a heuristic algorithm securing consistent functionality of the computational process even despite the varying input and user conditions given in the receding horizon.

Most power line communication (PLC) models are designed to date simulate power lines as two-wire lines. However, in alternating current (AC) electrical distribution, the two-wire option is seldom applied, and medium-voltage lines are most often based on the three-phase configuration. In this context, the influence of the ground, which constitutes another conductor with specific parameters, cannot be neglected. Two-wire models are characterized by limited accuracy, not allowing us to simulate certain major phenomena affecting PLC. This, for example, could embody the answer to the question of whether it is more advantageous to transmit a signal independently through each phase, reference the signal with respect to another phase or to use the ground as a reference. This paper discusses a multi-conductor model that eliminates the disadvantages outlined above; the proposed model exploits the multi-conductor telegrapher’s equations. In order to be able to include medium-voltage (MV)/ low-voltage (LV) transformers in medium-voltage network models, we constituted a transformer model. The designed models were validated on a real medium-voltage network. To be able to evaluate the suitability of the PLC, the noise in the medium voltage network was measured in order to determine the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).