Development platform for a Home Building Energy Management System

[CyberWalker]

Can anyone please suggest a good development platform for research on a Home Building Energy Management System (HBEMS) project?+
 
The project involves :
Power Flow control algorithms
 
Artificial Neural Networks (hopefully adaptive) and
 
Time Scheduling with Genetic algorithms.
 
Do you have any suggestions?!

[Mechatrommer]

why do you need artificial intelligence in power management?

[notsob]

AI would be needed to deal with the energy providers call centre

[PeterG]

Hmm.... Getting an AI to wait hours on hold AND understand Indian call centre operators? Theres a challenge rite there...

Regards

[Rerouter]

that there is a whole bunch of complex math and even more complex programming,

you need to give, WAY more info before any of us have even the tiniest insight in which direction to point you to,

also what do you mean by power flow algorithms, as power does not flow, i think what you mean is a system that can budget and control your power usage, e.g. dim the lights in a section where no one is present and relaxing the aircon on dormant floors,  is this correct?

adaptive algorithms are something you really have to understand before you can correctly attempt to implement them, for the main reason that they self modify, so if you dont set up the correct constraints you end up with something that gets out of control,

[Mechatrommer]

in other word, you need to read a book specific to neu-net or genetic algorithm, unrelated to power management or any other specific field. its generic applicable to almost any area. i have those books which i dont know what language (on the surface its english) and dont understand the slightiest shit what they are talking about inside. if you need specific then find a book on "neu-net for power management" or "genetic for power management" etc. and again good luck reading, in my 2cnts, this is the area that i will need a teacher to guide me or say farewell to the world because i'll go far far away to a cave to meditate on this for a very long long time.

[Rerouter]

equally as a note from my own experiences with larger scale control systems, interlock every function so that it only operates as you want it to, if you think every light switch wont be flicked at once or a keycard wont corrupt, or even that someone overseing it wont be a new guy that just pushes buttons until something works and has no idea what they are doing you will be very sadly mistaken

for example most rush job plc code has an issue where by holding down the start buttton you can overide all of your safetys that break the latch or should it be stopped and some system was mid way through a script it will go from the beginning even if for instance the tanks your filling are already 90% full,

generally people learn to rewrite it so that is no longer the case, but it still happens in the early stages due to a lack of interlocking and coding that can handle those situations, and to make clear interlocking is where you make sure a function can only be started in a way you intend, and works on what it sees rather than a fixed routine, e.g. so that the tank stopped filling at 90% or skipped to the next step entirely because it noticed it was already full,

[CyberWalker]

Thank you all for your considerations and thoughts. 

The aim is to design an electric management system that will be able to save energy costs by time-shifting and switching off electrical home appliances in an automated and non-intrusive, invisible to the human user, way.

The outcome of the AI is the optimal solution of a multi-criterion problem. Regarding the math around it, yes, it's quite complex. A good ARM would probably be OK but I want YOUR thoughts on this.

Everything is done in paper and software models (mostly in MATLAB), no need to study anything at this point I hope. I will have to do a lot of research after applying all this into hardware. 

Your help will be priceless if you can suggest a platform (development board and/or software) to transfer/port/embed my code in it!