Microgrids have emerged as a practical solution to improve the power system resilience against unpredicted failures and power outages. Microgrids offer substantial benefits for customers through the local supply of domestic demands as well as reducing curtailment during possible disruptions. Furthermore, the interdependency of natural gas and power networks is a key factor in energy systems’ resilience during critical hours. This paper suggests a probabilistic optimization of networked multi-carrier microgrids (NMCMG), addressing the uncertainties associated with thermal and electrical demands, renewable power generation, and the electricity market. The approach aims to minimize the NMCMG costs associated with the operation, maintenance, CO2e emission, startup and shutdown cost of units, incentive and penalty payments, as well as load curtailment during unpredicted failures. Moreover, two types of demand response programs (DRPs), including time-based and incentive-based DRPs, are addressed. The DRPs unlock the flexibility potentials of domestic demands to compensate for the power shortage during critical hours. The heat-power dual dependency characteristic of combined heat and power systems as a substantial technology in microgrids is considered in the model. The simulation results confirm that the suggested NMCMG not only integrates the flexibility potentials into the microgrids but also enhances the resilience of the energy systems.

The random decisions of electric vehicle (EV) drivers, together with the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) energy transfer modes, make scheduling for an intelligent parking lot (IPL) more complex; thus, they have not been considered simultaneously during IPL planning in other studies. To fill this gap, this paper presents a complete optimal schedule for an IPL in which all the above-mentioned items are considered simultaneously. Additionally, using a complete objective function—including charging/discharging rates and prices, together with penalties, discounts, and reward sets—increases the profits of IPL and EV owners. In addition, during peak times, the demand for energy from the distribution system is decreased. The performance of the proposed schedule is validated by comparing three different scenarios during numerical simulations. The results confirm that the proposed algorithm can improve the IPL’s benefits up to USD 1000 and USD 2500 compared to the cases that do not consider the V2V and V2G energy transfer modes, respectively.

Battery energy systems are playing significant roles in smart homes, e.g., absorbing the uncertainty of solar energy from root-top photovoltaic, supplying energy during a power outage, and responding to dynamic electricity prices. For the safe and economic operation of batteries, an optimal battery-management system (BMS) is required. One of the most important features of a BMS is state-of-charge (SoC) estimation. This article presents a robust central-difference Kalman filter (CDKF) method for the SoC estimation of on-site lithium-ion batteries in smart homes. The state-space equations of the battery are derived based on the equivalent circuit model. The battery model includes two RC subnetworks to represent the fast and slow transient responses of the terminal voltage. Moreover, the model includes the nonlinear relationship between the open-circuit voltage (OCV) and SoC. The proposed robust CDKF method can accurately estimate the SoC in the presence of the time-varying model uncertainties and measurement noises. Being able to cope with model uncertainties and measurement noises is essential, since they can lead to inaccurate SoC estimations. An experiment test bench is developed, and various experiments are conducted to extract the battery model parameters. The experimental results show that the proposed method can more accurately estimate SoC compared with other Kalman filter-based methods. The proposed method can be used in optimal BMSs to promote battery performance and decrease battery operational costs in smart homes.

The power system planning problem considering system loss function, voltage profile function, the cost function of FACTS (flexible alternating current transmission system) devices, and stability function are investigated in this paper. With the growth of electronic technologies, FACTS devices have improved stability and more reliable planning in reactive power (RP) planning. In addition, in modern power systems, renewable resources have an inevitable effect on power system planning. Therefore, wind resources make a complicated problem of planning due to conflicting functions and non-linear constraints. This confliction is the stochastic nature of the cost, loss, and voltage functions that cannot be summarized in function. A multi-objective hybrid algorithm is proposed to solve this problem by considering the linear and non-linear constraints that combine particle swarm optimization (PSO) and the virus colony search (VCS). VCS is a new optimization method based on viruses’ search function to destroy host cells and cause the penetration of the best virus into a cell for reproduction. In the proposed model, the PSO is used to enhance local and global search. In addition, the non-dominated sort of the Pareto criterion is used to sort the data. The optimization results on different scenarios reveal that the combined method of the proposed hybrid algorithm can improve the parameters such as convergence time, index of voltage stability, and absolute magnitude of voltage deviation, and this method can reduce the total transmission line losses. In addition, the presence of wind resources has a positive effect on the mentioned issue.