In recent years, demand side management (DSM) techniques have been designed for residential, industrial and commercial sectors. These techniques are very effective in flattening the load profile of customers in grid area networks. In this paper, a heuristic algorithms-based energy management controller is designed for a residential area in a smart grid. In essence, five heuristic algorithms (the genetic algorithm (GA), the binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) algorithm, the bacterial foraging optimization algorithm (BFOA), the wind-driven optimization (WDO) algorithm and our proposed hybrid genetic wind-driven (GWD) algorithm) are evaluated. These algorithms are used for scheduling residential loads between peak hours (PHs) and off-peak hours (OPHs) in a real-time pricing (RTP) environment while maximizing user comfort (UC) and minimizing both electricity cost and the peak to average ratio (PAR). Moreover, these algorithms are tested in two scenarios: (i) scheduling the load of a single home and (ii) scheduling the load of multiple homes. Simulation results show that our proposed hybrid GWD algorithm performs better than the other heuristic algorithms in terms of the selected performance metrics.

A smart grid (SG) is a modernized electric grid that enhances the reliability, efficiency, sustainability, and economics of electricity services. Moreover, it plays a vital role in modern energy infrastructure. The core challenge faced by SGs is how to efficiently utilize different kinds of front-end smart devices, such as smart meters and power assets, and in what manner to process the enormous volume of data received from these devices. Furthermore, cloud and fog computing provide on-demand resources for computation, which is a good solution to overcome SG hurdles. Fog-based cloud computing has numerous good characteristics, such as cost-saving, energy-saving, scalability, flexibility, and agility. Resource management is one of the big issues in SGs. In this paper, we propose a cloud–fog–based model for resource management in SGs. The key idea of the proposed work is to determine a hierarchical structure of cloud–fog computing to provide different types of computing services for SG resource management. Regarding the performance enhancement of cloud computing, different load balancing techniques are used. For load balancing between an SG user’s requests and service providers, five algorithms are implemented: round robin, throttled, artificial bee colony (ABC), ant colony optimization (ACO), and particle swarm optimization. Moreover, we propose a hybrid approach of ACO and ABC known as hybrid artificial bee ant colony optimization (HABACO). Simulation results show that our proposed technique HABACO outperformed the other techniques.

Presently, the advancements in the electric system, smart meters, and implementation of renewable energy sources (RES) have yielded extensive changes to the current power grid. This technological innovation in the power grid enhances the generation of electricity to meet the demands of industrial, commercial and residential sectors. However, the industrial sectors are the focus of power grid and its demand-side management (DSM) activities. Neglecting other sectors in the DSM activities can deteriorate the total performance of the power grid. Hence, the notion of DSM and demand response by way of the residential sector makes the smart grid preferable to the current power grid. In this circumstance, this paper proposes a home energy management system (HEMS) that considered the residential sector in DSM activities and the integration of RES and energy storage system (ESS). The proposed HEMS reduces the electricity cost through scheduling of household appliances and ESS in response to the time-of-use (ToU) and critical peak price (CPP) of the electricity market. The proposed HEMS is implemented using the Earliglow based algorithm. For comparative analysis, the simulation results of the proposed method are compared with other methods: Jaya algorithm, enhanced differential evolution and strawberry algorithm. The simulation results of Earliglow based optimization method show that the integration of RES and ESS can provide electricity cost savings up to 62.80% and 20.89% for CPP and ToU. In addition, electricity cost reduction up to 43.25% and 13.83% under the CPP and ToU market prices, respectively.

The feature of bidirectional communication in a smart grid involves the interaction between consumer and utility for optimizing the energy consumption of the users. For optimal management of the energy at the end user, several demand side management techniques are implemented. This work proposes a home energy management system, where consumption of household appliances is optimized using a hybrid technique. This technique is developed from cuckoo search algorithm and earthworm algorithm. However, there is a problem in such home energy management systems, that is, an uncertain behavior of the user that can lead to force start or stop of an appliance, deteriorating the purpose of scheduling of appliances. In order to solve this issue, coordination among appliances for rescheduling is incorporated in home energy management system using game theory. The appliances of the home are categorized in three different groups and their electricity cost is computed through the real-time pricing signals. Optimization schemes are implemented and their performance is scrutinized with and without coordination among the appliances. Simulation outcomes display that our proposed technique has minimized the total electricity cost by 50.6% as compared to unscheduled cost. Moreover, coordination among appliances has helped in increasing the user comfort by reducing the waiting time of appliances. The Shapley value has outperformed the Nash equilibrium and zero sum by achieving the maximum reduction in waiting time of appliances.

In this work, a new orchestration of Consumer to Fog to Cloud (C2F2C) based framework is proposed for efficiently managing the resources in residential buildings. C2F2C is a three layered framework consisting of cloud layer, fog layer and consumer layer. Cloud layer deals with on-demand delivery of the consumer’s demands. Resource management is intelligently done through the fog layer because it reduces the latency and enhances the reliability of cloud. Consumer layer is based on the residential users and their electricity demands from the six regions of the world. These regions are categorized on the bases of the continents. Two control parameters are considered: clusters of buildings and load requests, whereas four performance parameters are considered: Request Per Hour (RPH), Response Time (RT), Processing Time (PT) and cost in terms of Virtual Machines (VMs), Microgrids (MGs) and data transfer. These parameters are analysed by the round robin algorithm, equally spread current execution algorithm and our proposed algorithm shortest job first. Two scenarios are used in the simulations: resource allocation using MGs and resource allocation using MGs and power storage devices for checking the effectiveness of the proposed work. The simulation results of the proposed technique show that it has outperformed the previous techniques in terms of the above-mentioned parameters. There exists a tradeoff in the PT and RT as compared to cost of VM, MG and data transfer.

A demand response (DR) based home energy management systems (HEMS) synergies with renewable energy sources (RESs) and energy storage systems (ESSs). In this work, a three-step simulation based posteriori method is proposed to develop a scheme for eco-efficient operation of HEMS. The proposed method provides the trade-off between the net cost of energy ( $CEnet$ ) and the time-based discomfort ( $TBD$ ) due to shifting of home appliances (HAs). At step-1, primary trade-offs for $CEnet$ , $TBD$ and minimal emissions $TEMiss$ are generated through a heuristic method. This method takes into account photovoltaic availability, the state of charge, the related rates for the storage system, mixed shifting of HAs, inclining block rates, the sharing-based parallel operation of power sources, and selling of the renewable energy to the utility. The search has been driven through multi-objective genetic algorithm and Pareto based optimization. A filtration mechanism (based on the trends exhibited by $TEMiss$ in consideration of $CEnet$ and $TBD$ ) is devised to harness the trade-offs with minimal emissions. At step-2, a constraint filter based on the average value of $TEMiss$ is used to filter out the trade-offs with extremely high values of $TEMiss$ . At step-3, another constraint filter (made up of an average surface fit for $TEMiss$ ) is applied to screen out the trade-offs with marginally high values of $TEMiss$ . The surface fit is developed using polynomial models for regression based on the least sum of squared errors. The selected solutions are classified for critical trade-off analysis to enable the consumer choice for the best options. Furthermore, simulations validate our proposed method in terms of aforementioned objectives.