High penetration of selfish Home Energy Management Systems (HEMSs) causes adverse effects such as rebound peaks, instabilities, and contingencies in different regions of distribution grid. To avoid these effects and relieve power grid stress, the concept of HEMSs coordination has been suggested. Particularly, this concept can be employed to fulfill important grid objectives in neighborhood areas such as flattening aggregated load profile, decreasing electricity bills, facilitating energy trading, diminishing reverse power flow, managing distributed energy resources, and modifying consumers' consumption/generation patterns. This paper reviews the latest investigations into coordinated HEMSs. The required steps to implement these systems, accounting for coordination topologies and techniques, are thoroughly explored. This exploration is mainly reported through classifying coordination approaches according to their utilization of decomposition algorithms. Furthermore, major features, advantages, and disadvantages of the methods are examined. Specifically, coordination process characteristics, its mathematical issues and essential prerequisites, as well as players concerns are analyzed. Subsequently, specific applications of coordination designs are discussed and categorized. Through a comprehensive investigation, this work elaborates significant remarks on critical gaps in existing studies toward a useful coordination structure for practical HEMSs implementations. Unlike other reviews, the present survey focuses on effective frameworks to determine future opportunities that make the concept of coordinated HEMSs feasible. Indeed, providing effective studies on HEMSs coordination concept is beneficial to both consumers and service providers since as reported, these systems can lead to 5% to 30% reduction in electricity bills.

Demand Response (DR) programs show great promise for energy saving and load profile flattening. They bring about an opportunity for indirect control of end-users’ demand based on different price policies. However, the difficulty in characterizing the price-responsive behavior of customers is a significant challenge towards an optimal selection of these policies. This paper proposes a Demand Response Aggregator (DRA) for transactive policy generation by combining a Reinforcement Learning (RL) technique on the aggregator side with a convex optimization problem on the customer side. The proposed DRA can maintain users’ privacy by exploiting the DR as the only source of information. In addition, it can avoid mistakenly penalizing users by offering price discounts as an incentive to realize a satisfying multi-agent environment. With an ensured convergence, the resultant DRA is capable of learning adaptive Time-of-Use (ToU) tariffs and generating near-to-optimal price policies. Moreover, this study suggests an off-line training procedure that can deal with issues related to the convergence time of RL algorithms. The suggested process can notably expedite the DRA convergence and, in turn, enable online applications. The developed method is applied to a set of residential agents in order to benefit them by regulating their thermal loads according to generated price policies. The efficiency of the proposed approach is thoroughly evaluated from the standpoint of the aggregator and customers in terms of load shifting and comfort maintenance, respectively. Besides, the superior performance of the selected RL method is represented through a comparative study. An additional assessment is also conducted by use of a coordination algorithm to validate the competitiveness of the recommended DR program. The multifaceted evaluation demonstrates that the designed scheme can significantly improve the quality of the aggregated load profile with a low reduction in the aggregator’s income.

Anomaly detection is a significant application of residential appliances load monitoring systems. As an essential prerequisite of load diagnosis services, anomaly detection is critical to energy saving and occupant comfort actualization. Notwithstanding, the investigation into diagnosis of household anomalous appliances has not been decently taken into consideration. This paper presents an extensive study about operation-time anomaly detection of household devices particularly, refrigerators, in terms of appliances candidate, by utilizing their energy consumption data. Energy as a quantitative property of electrical loads, is a reliable information for a robust diagnosis. Additionally, it is very practical since it is low-priced to measure and definite to interpret. Subsequently, an on-line anomaly detection approach is proposed to effectively determine the anomalous operation of the household appliances candidate. The proposed approach is capable of continuously monitoring energy consumption and providing dynamic information for anomaly detection algorithms. A machine learning-based technique is employed to construct efficient models of appliances normal behavior with application to operation-time anomaly detection. The performance of the suggested approach is evaluated through a set of diagnostic tests, by utilizing normal and anomalous data of targeted devices, measured by an acquisition system. In addition, a comparison analysis is provided in order to further examine the effectiveness of the developed mechanism by exploiting a public database. Moreover, this study elaborates sensible remarks on an effective management of anomaly detection and diagnosis decision phases, pivotal to correctly recognition of a faulty/abnormal operation. Indeed, through experimental results of case studies, this work assists in the development of a load monitoring and anomaly detection system with practical implementation.

This paper investigates a non-intrusive approach of retrieving electric space heater (ESH) power profiles from a residential aggregated signal. In cold-climate regions with heating appliances controlled by electronic thermostats, an accurate non-intrusive recognition of power profiles is a challenging task. Accordingly, a robust disaggregation approach based on the difference factorial hidden Markov model (DFHMM) and the Kronecker operation is contributed. The proposed method aims to uncover the underlying stochastic tow-state models of ESHs using their common prior knowledge. The major advantage of the developed load-monitoring architecture consists of modeling simplicity and inference as well as load-detection efficacy in the presence of perturbations from other unknown loads. The experimental results prove the effectiveness of the method in manipulating the challenging case of multiple two-state loads with a high event overlapping probability.

The increase of Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEVs) penetration in distribution systems necessitates processing strategic assets in order to deal with their energy needs. A careful investigation into matters related to PEV charging management under actual circumstances can be regarded as the critical step towards enabling this process. Accordingly, this paper intends to design a practical controller capable of performing charging scheduling under uncertainties related to the lack of access to crucial PEV information accounting for departure time, energy requirement, and power demand nonlinearity. Although such an issue can be encountered when developing charging models for real-world conditions, it has not been adequately taken into consideration. The proposed controller carries out charging scheduling through a procedure with a set of effective straightforward algorithms, essential for actual applications. Particularly, it takes advantage of a Bayesian forecasting model that is able to efficiently predict charging energy demand according to car owner’s behavior. In addition, it employs a stochastic optimization framework to schedule PEV charging based on the dynamic electricity price and user preference. Several case studies are conducted to examine the performance of suggested controller in optimal scheduling by exploiting real data. The evaluation process is executed through a comparative analysis by using a deterministic method, as the ideal case, which exploits a full-information space. The results show that the proposed procedure can offer competitive charging schedules, which can minimize the cost while satisfying user desires. The designed controller can successfully manage PEV charging in the presence of stochastic phenomena with limited information access, and thus, enable physical implementations.