As the climate crisis worsens, power grids are gradually transforming into a more sustainable state through renewable energy sources (RESs), energy storage systems (ESSs), and smart loads. Virtual power plants (VPP) are an emerging concept that can flexibly integrate distributed energy resources (DERs), managing manage the power output of each DER unit, as well as the power consumption of loads, to balance electricity supply and demand in real time. VPPs can participate in energy markets, enable self-scheduling of RESs, facilitate energy trading and sharing, and provide demand-side frequency control ancillary services (D-FCAS) to enhance the stability of the system frequency. As a result, studies considering VPPs have become the focus of recent energy research, with the purpose of reducing the uncertainty resulting from RESs distributed in the power grid and improving technology related to energy management system (EMS). However, comprehensive reviews of VPPs considering their formation, control techniques, and D-FCAS are still lacking in the literature. Therefore, this paper aims to provide a thorough overview of state-of-the-art VPP technologies for building sustainable power grids in the future. The review mainly considers the development of VPPs, the information transmission and control methods among DERs and loads in VPPs, as well as the relevant technologies for providing D-FCAS from VPPs. This review paper describes the significant economic, social, and environmental benefits of VPPs, as well as the technological advancements, challenges, and possible future research directions in VPP research.

Energy is the foundation for human survival and socio-economic development, and electricity is a key form of energy. Electricity prices are a key factor affecting the interests of various stakeholders in the electricity market, playing a significant role in the sustainable development of energy and the environment. As the number of distributed energy resources (DERs) increases, today’s power systems no longer rely on a vertical market model and fixed electricity pricing scheme but instead depend on power dispatch and dynamic pricing to match supply and demand. This can help prevent significant fluctuations in supply–load imbalance and maintain system stability. Modern power grids have evolved by integrating information, communication, and intelligent control technologies with traditional power systems, giving rise to the concept of smart electric grids. Choosing an appropriate pricing scheme to manage large-scale DERs and controllable loads in today’s power grid become very important. However, the existing literature lacks a comprehensive review of electricity pricing in power systems and its transformative impact on shaping the energy landscape. To fill this void, this paper provides a survey on the developments, methods, and frameworks related to electricity pricing and energy trading. The review mainly considers the development of pricing in a centralized power grid, peer-to-peer (P2P) and microgrid-to-microgrid (M2M) energy trading and sharing, and various pricing methods. The review will cover the pricing schemes in modern power systems, particularly with respect to renewable energy sources (RESs) and batteries, as well as controllable load applications, and the impact of pricing schemes based on demand-side ancillary services (DSAS) for grid frequency support. Lastly, this review article describes the current frameworks and limitations of electricity pricing in the current energy market, as well as future research directions. This review should offer a great overview and deep insights into today’s electricity market and how pricing methods will drive and facilitate the future establishment of smart energy systems.

This study presents a knowledge graph construction scheme leveraging large language models (LLMs) for task-oriented semantic communication systems. The proposed methodology systematically addresses four critical stages: corpus collection, entity extraction and relationship analysis, knowledge base generation, and dynamic updating mechanisms. It is worth noting that prompt engineering is combined with few-shot learning to enhance reliability and accuracy in this methodology. Experimental demonstration showed that this methodology had superior entity extraction performance, achieving 89.7% precision and 92.3% recall rate. This scheme overcomes the demand for domain knowledge and the labor cost of traditional knowledge base construction schemes. It greatly improves the construction efficiency of knowledge graphs. This paper provides an efficient and reliable task knowledge base construction scheme for task-oriented semantic communication, which is expected to promote its wider application.

With the development of artificial intelligence and computer hardware, semantic communication has been attracting great interest. As an emerging communication paradigm, semantic communication can reduce the requirement for channel bandwidth by extracting semantic information. This is an effective method that can be applied to image acquisition of unmanned aerial vehicles, which can transmit high-data-volume images within the constraints of limited available bandwidth. However, the existing semantic communication schemes fail to adequately incorporate the guidance of task requirements into the semantic communication process and are difficult to adapt to the dynamic changes of tasks. A task-oriented image semantic communication scheme driven by knowledge base is proposed, aiming at achieving high compression ratio and high quality image reconstruction, and effectively solving the bandwidth limitation. This scheme segments the input image into several semantic information unit under the guidance of task requirements by Yolo-World and Segment Anything Model. The assigned bandwidth for each unit is according to the task relevance scores, which enables high-quality transmission of task-related information with lower communication overheads. An improved metric weighted learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS) is proposed to evaluate the transmission accuracy of the novel scheme. Experimental results show that our scheme achieves a notable performance improvement on weighted LPIPS while the same compression ratio compared with traditional image compression schemes. Our scheme has a higher target capture ratio than traditional image compression schemes under the task of target detection.

In dealing with emergency events, it is very important when making scientific and correct decisions. As an important premise, the creation of information needs is quite essential. Taking earthquakes as a type of unexpected event, this paper constructs a large and model-driven system for automating the generating process of information requirements for earthquake response. This research explores how the different departments interact during an earthquake emergency response, how the information interacts with each other, and how the information requirement process operates. The system is designed from three points of view, building a knowledge base, designing and developing prompts, and designing the system structure. It talks about how computers automatically make info needs for sudden emergencies. During the experimental process, the backbone architectures used were four Large Language Models (LLMs): chatGLM (GLM-4.6), Spark (SparkX1.5), ERNIE Bot (4.5 Turbo), and DeepSeek (V3.2). According to the desired system process, information needs is generated by real-word cases and then they are compared to the gathered information needs by experts. In the comparison process, the “keyword weighted matching + text structure feature fusion” method was used to calculate the semantic similarity. Like true positives, false positives, and false negatives can be used to find differences and calculate metrics like precision and recal. And the F1-score is also computed. The experimental results show that all four LLMs achieved a precision and recall of over 90% in earthquake information extraction, with their F1-scores all exceeding 85%. This verifies the feasibility of the analytical method a chatGLM dopted in this research. Through comparative analysis, it was found that chatGLM exhibited the best performance, with an F1-score of 93.2%. Eventually, Python is used to script these aforementioned processes, which then create complete comparison charts for visual and test result checking. In the course of researching we also use Protege to create the knowledge requirements ontology, so it is easy for us to show and look at it. This research is particularly useful for emergency management departments, earthquake emergency response teams, and those working on intelligent emergency information systems or those focusing on the automated information requirement generation using technologies such as LLMs. It provides practical support for optimizing rapid decision-making in earthquake emergency response.