Recently, the problem of power consumption has been a topic of great interest
locally and worldwide. Nowadays Egypt faces a huge energy crisis that affects its facilities, citizens, and establishments. Every day cities and factories are exposed to electricity cut-off and blackouts due to overloads on power plants. Moreover these blackouts can cause a loss in lives and money in many critical
situat
ions such as hospitals, schools, stock exchanges, etc. Furthermore people
feel a great discomfort and unsettled as result of these cut-offs. Luckily there are two aspects for solving this problem: generating more
electricity and reducing the energy consumption. Electricity generation isn’t an easy task as it involves many challenges in current time such as it needs massive
amount of money, huge area, searching for new source of energy. Consequently reducing power consumption is the obvious choice as it has an
immediate effect and can help solving the problem. So our project Optimization of Electricity (OpElec) was developed to address this issue. It is a system that is
capable of meeting users’ needs while keeping power consumption under certain
range. OpElec consists of three main components: Electricity Optimization,
Remote control of the system, in addition to Real-time Monitoring of the power
usage and estimating the cost of power consumption. In electricity optimization, the user can choose between Manual/Automatic
control modes through a desktop application. Also the desktop application
generates detailed reports about devices power consumption, time consumed by
switched-on devices, and the state of each device (i.e. whether the device is
switched on or off). Moreover - using internet connection - the system enables the user to control
his devices remotely from anywhere in the world using the remote control
capability of the system. Further Real-time Monitoring calculates power
consumption and cost of power, and graphs power consumption against time.
