The increasing price of and demand for energy have prompted several organizations to develop intelligent strategies for energy tracking, control, and conservation. Demand side management is a critical strategy for averting substantial supply disruptions and improving energy efficiency. A vital part of demand side management is a smart energy management system that can aid in cutting expenditures while still satisfying energy needs; produce customers’ energy consumption patterns; and react to energy-saving algorithms and directives. The Internet of Things is an emerging technology that can be employed to effectively manage energy usage in industrial, commercial, and residential sectors in the smart environment. This paper presents a smart energy management system for smart environments that integrates the Energy Controller and IoT middleware module for efficient demand side management. Each device is connected to an energy controller, which is the inculcation of numerous sensors and actuators with an IoT object, collects the data of energy consumption from each smart device through various time-slots that are designed to optimize the energy consumption of air conditioning systems based on ambient temperature conditions and operational dynamics of buildings and then communicate it to a centralized middleware module (cloud server) for management, processing, and further analysis. Since air conditioning systems contribute more than 50% of the electricity consumption in Pakistan, for validation of the proposed system, the air conditioning units have been taken as a proof of concept. The presented approach offers several advantages over traditional controllers by leveraging real-time monitoring, advanced algorithms, and user-friendly interfaces. The evaluation process involves comparing electricity consumption before and after the installation of the SEMS. The proposed system is tested and implemented in four buildings. The results demonstrate significant energy savings ranging from 15% to 49% and highlight the significant benefits of the system. The smart energy management system offers real-time monitoring, better control over the air conditioning systems, cost savings, environmental benefits, and longer equipment life. The ultimate goal is to provide a practical solution for reducing energy consumption in buildings, which can contribute to sustainable and efficient use of energy resources and goes beyond simpler controllers to address the specific needs of energy management in buildings.

Growth of population and the inception of new devices every day comes with an incessant rise in energy consumption and has brought great challenges in terms of energy management at the consumer side. With the evolution of technology, smart meters (SMs) are not only considered merely as tools to measure energy consumption but act as a main resource of energy management systems. The application of SM spans over a wide range of advantages, including accurate billing data, information of utilization at the user end, the establishment of two-way communication and remote control of the user equipment. SM is the most essential element of a smart power grid that with the help of any smart energy management system (SEMS), assesses, measures, controls, implements and communicates power allocation, utilization, and consumption at both, single device, and network level. Data provided by the SMs is used by power supply companies to revolutionize power distribution and consumption through various techniques such as, non-intrusive load monitoring and demand-side management (DSM). For efficient data gathering and utilization, internet of things (IoT) is emerging as a key partner in the power industry leading to effective resource management. This paper provides presentation, deployment, and validation of an IoT based SEMS strategy and its related benefits to overcome challenges of energy management at consumer side. The presented SEMS incorporates various communication interfaces and protocols to integrate with any software-based smart solution. In this work, Entrack software is used for data gathering and analysis. As a proof of concept, the presented system is tested and implemented in 4 different buildings of a well-known private company in Pakistan, i.e., Stylo Pvt. Ltd. The case study analysis in this work shows the effectiveness of the presented IoT based SEMS.

Load forecasting (LF) has become the main concern in decentralized power generation systems with the smart grid revolution in the 21st century. As an intriguing research topic, it facilitates generation systems by providing essential information for load scheduling, demand-side integration, and energy market pricing and reducing cost. An intelligent LF model of residential loads using a novel machine learning (ML)-based approach, achieved by assembling an integration strategy model in a smart grid context, is proposed. The proposed model improves the LF by optimizing the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE). The time-series-based autoregression schemes were carried out to collect historical data and set the objective functions of the proposed model. An algorithm consisting of seven different autoregression models was also developed and validated through a feedforward adaptive-network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) model, based on the ML approach. Moreover, a binary genetic algorithm (BGA) was deployed for the best feature selection, and the best fitness score of the features was obtained with principal component analysis (PCA). A unique decision integration strategy is presented that led to a remarkably improved transformation in reducing MAPE. The model was tested using a one-year Pakistan Residential Electricity Consumption (PRECON) dataset, and the attained results verify that the proposed model obtained the best feature selection and achieved very promising values of MAPE of 1.70%, 1.77%, 1.80%, and 1.67% for summer, fall, winter, and spring seasons, respectively. The overall improvement percentage is 17%, which represents a substantial increase for small-scale decentralized generation units.

Price forecasting (PF) is the primary concern in distributed power generation. This paper presents a novel and improved technique to forecast electricity prices. The data of various power producers, Capacity Purchase Price (CPP), Power Purchase Price (PPP), Tariff rates, and load demand from National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) are considered for MAPE reduction in PF. Eight time-series and auto-regression algorithms are developed for data fetching and setting the objective function. The feed-forward ANFIS based on the ML approach and space vector regression (SVR) is introduced to PF by taking the input from time series and auto-regression (AR) algorithms. Best-feature selection is conducted by adopting the Binary Genetic Algorithm (BGA)-Principal Component Analysis (PCA) approach that ultimately minimizes the complexity and computational time of the model. The proposed integration strategy computes the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and the overall improvement percentage is 9.24%, which is valuable in price forecasting of the energy management system (EMS). In the end, EMS based on the Firefly algorithm (FA) has been presented, and by implementing FA, the cost of electricity has been reduced by 21%, 19%, and 20% for building 1, 2, and 3, respectively.

The combination of signal processing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the robotics and automation industry by the deployment of intelligent systems and reducing human intervention. Reading human brain signal through electroencephalography (EEG) has provided a new direction of research that automate machines through the human brain and computer interface or Brain–Computer Interface (BCI). The study is also inspired by the same concept of intelligently controlling a robotic arm using BCI and AI to help physically disabled individuals. The proposed system is non-invasive, unlike existing technologies that provide a reliable comparison of different AI-based classification algorithms. This paper also predicts a reliable bandwidth for the BCI process and provides exact placements of EEG electrodes to verify different arm moments. We have applied different classification algorithms, i.e., Random Forest, KNN, Gradient Boosting, Logistic Regression, SVM, and Decision Tree, to four different users. The accuracy of all prescribed classifiers has been calculated by considering the first user as a reference. The presented results validate the novel deployment, and the comparison shows that the accuracy for Random Forest remained optimal at around 76%, Gradient Boosting is around 74%, while the lowest is 64% for Decision Tree. It has been observed that people have different activation bandwidths while the dominant frequency varies from person-to-person that causes fluctuations in the EEG dataset.