Demand management is becoming an indispensable part of grid operation with its potential to aid supply/demand balancing, reduce peaks, mitigate congestions and improve voltage profiles in the grid. Effective deployments require a huge number of reliable participators who are aware of the flexibilities of their devices and who continuously seek to achieve savings and earnings. In such applications, smart meters can ease consumption behavior visibility, while building automation systems can enable the remote and automated control of flexible loads. Moreover, gamification techniques can be used to motivate and direct customers, evaluate their performance, and improve their awareness and knowledge in the long term. This study focuses on the design and field demonstration of a flexible device-oriented, smart meter and building automation system (BAS) compatible with a gamified load management (LM) platform for residential customers. The system is designed, based on exploratory surveys and systematic gamification approaches, to motivate the customers to reduce their peak period consumption and overall energy consumption through competing or collaborating with others, and improving upon their past performance. This paper presents the design, development and implementation stages, together with the result analysis of an eight month field demonstration in four houses with different user types in Istanbul, Turkey.

Building automation systems (BAS) have promising potential to support power and energy management applications, in addition to the current and conventional intention of use for improving comfort. Integration of BAS with smart meters to provide remote monitoring and control over user-friendly interfaces can foster consumer awareness, proactiveness towards more effective use of energy and it is one of the keystones of the future's smart cities. This paper proposes development and field implementation of a remote monitoring, control and data processing system for residential customers. The system is designed to comprise a widely used BAS protocol (KNX) and smart meters in the market, adding on a central database and a web application. The developed solution is implemented in 3 houses with real residents in Istanbul, Turkey. The study provides developments for hardware-software integration in building energy management and solutions for problems encountered during field implementation. Energy management potential of three houses from the field is also discussed.

Long-term, regular, grid-aware participants are one of the cornerstones of demand management activities that provide grid services. However, voluntary participation to demand management activities is still at low rates, while most customers are not sufficiently aware of the management potential of their flexible loads. Smart metering and data post-processing play a vital role in demand management programs to visualize consumption profiles, highlight flexibility potential and evaluate load management performance of customers. Additionally, gamification techniques can be employed to motivate users to achieve behavioral changes in their consumption profiles, providing financial and social incentives. Long-term field demonstrations and exploration of detailed evaluation metrics have been the main gaps in this area of study. This paper presents and discusses the results of a 13-month field demonstration of a gamified residential demand management platform. 4-month monitoring period is followed by a 9-month gamification period in four houses in Istanbul, Turkey.