A home energy management (HEM) system is an integral part of a smart grid that can potentially enable demand response applications for residential customers. This paper presents an intelligent HEM algorithm for managing high power consumption household appliances with simulation for demand response (DR) analysis. The proposed algorithm manages household loads according to their preset priority and guarantees the total household power consumption below certain levels. A simulation tool is developed to showcase the applicability of the proposed algorithm in performing DR at an appliance level. This paper demonstrates that the tool can be used to analyze DR potentials for residential customers. Given the lack of understanding about DR potentials in this market, this work serves as an essential stepping-stone toward providing an insight into how much DR can be performed for residential customers.

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning process, which allows multiple nodes to work together to train a shared model without exchanging raw data. It offers several key advantages, such as data privacy, security, efficiency, and scalability, by keeping data local and only exchanging model updates through the communication network. This review paper provides a comprehensive overview of federated learning, including its principles, strategies, applications, and tools along with opportunities, challenges, and future research directions. The findings of this paper emphasize that federated learning strategies can significantly help overcome privacy and confidentiality concerns, particularly for high-risk applications.

Electrical power consumption data and load profiles of major household appliances are crucial elements for demand response studies. This paper discusses load profiles of selected major household appliances in the U.S., including two clothes washers, two clothes dryers, two air conditioners, an electric water heater, an electric oven, a dishwasher, and two refrigerators. Their electrical power consumption data measured in one-second intervals, together with one-minute data (averaged over 60 one-second readings), are provided in an online data repository (URL: www.ari.vt.edu/research-data/). The data were gathered from two homes in Virginia and Maryland during July-October 2012. In this paper, demand response opportunities provided by these appliances are also discussed.

In recent years, the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) has increased exponentially, and cybersecurity concerns have increased along with it. On the cutting edge of cybersecurity is Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is used for the development of complex algorithms to protect networks and systems, including IoT systems. However, cyber-attackers have figured out how to exploit AI and have even begun to use adversarial AI in order to carry out cybersecurity attacks. This review paper compiles information from several other surveys and research papers regarding IoT, AI, and attacks with and against AI and explores the relationship between these three topics with the purpose of comprehensively presenting and summarizing relevant literature in these fields.

Over the last two decades, Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches have been applied to various applications of the smart grid, such as demand response, predictive maintenance, and load forecasting. However, AI is still considered to be a “black-box” due to its lack of explainability and transparency, especially for something like solar photovoltaic (PV) forecasts that involves many parameters. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has become an emerging research field in the smart grid domain since it addresses this gap and helps understand why the AI system made a forecast decision. This article presents several use cases of solar PV energy forecasting using XAI tools, such as LIME, SHAP, and ELI5, which can contribute to adopting XAI tools for smart grid applications. Understanding the inner workings of a prediction model based on AI can give insights into the application field. Such insight can provide improvements to the solar PV forecasting models and point out relevant parameters.

A Home Energy Management (HEM) system plays a crucial role in realizing residential Demand Response (DR) programs in the smart grid environment. It provides a homeowner the ability to automatically perform smart load controls based on utility signals, customer's preference and load priority. This paper presents the hardware demonstration of the proposed HEM system for managing end-use appliances. The HEM's communication time delay to perform load control is analyzed, along with its residual energy consumption.