A supply-demand model based scalable energy management system for improved energy utilization efficiency

Abstract

Harvesting energy from the environment can play an important role in reducing the dependency of an electronic system to primary energy sources (i.e. AC power or battery). For reliable and efficient energy harvesting while assuring best user experience, it is important to manage, route and match the harvested energy with the demand of various energy sources. In the most general case, multiple different energy sources can be used to provide energy to multiple different energy users. In this work, we propose a scalable rule-based energy management system for managing the acquisition, mixing, delivery and storage of energy for arbitrary collection of energy sources and users, which are characterized with different energy generation and consumption parameters. The system uses economics inspired supply-demand model for efficiently managing energy distribution between a set of energy sources and users. The energy allocation procedure tries to maximize the energy utilization efficiency of the sources while satisfying the demand of the users in order of their associated priorities, without starving an already allocated user. Simulation results for example scenarios show the effectiveness of the proposed approach for improving the energy utilization and lifetime of the energy sources.