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The emergence of the Demand Response (DR) program optimizes the energy consumption pattern of customers and improves the efficacy of energy supply. The pricing infra-structure of the DR program is dynamic (time-based). It has rather complex features including marginal costs, demand and seasonal parameters. There is variation in DR price rate. Sometime prices go high (peak load) if the demand of electricity is more than the generation capacity. The main objective of DR is to encourage the consumer to shift the peak load and gets incentives in terms of cost reduction. However, prices remain the same for all the users even if they shift the peak load or not. In this work, Game Theory (GT)-based Time-of-Use (ToU) pricing model is presented to define the rates for on-peak and shoulder-peak hours. The price is defined for each user according to the utilize load. At first, the proposed model is examined using the ToU pricing scheme. Afterward, it is evaluated using existing day-ahead real-time pricing scheme. Moreover, shifting load from on-peak hours to off-peak hours may cause rebound peak in off-peak hours. To avert this issue, we analysis the impact of Salp Swam Algorithm (SSA) and Rainfall Algorithm (RFA) on user electricity bill and PAR after scheduling. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed GT-based ToU pricing scheme. Furthermore, the RFA outperformed SSA.

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An unprecedented opportunity is presented by smart grid technologies to shift the energy industry into the new era of availability, reliability and efficiency that will contribute to our economic and environmental health. Renewable energy sources play a significant role in making environments greener and generating electricity at a cheaper cost. The cloud/fog computing also contributes to tackling the computationally intensive tasks in a smart grid. This work proposes an energy efficient approach to solve the energy management problem in the fog based environment. We consider a small community that consists of multiple smart homes. A microgrid is installed at each residence for electricity generation. Moreover, it is connected with the fog server to share and store information. Smart energy consumers are able to share the details of excess energy with each other through the fog server. The proposed approach is validated through simulations in terms of cost and imported electricity alleviation.

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The increasing load demand in residential area and irregular electricity load profile encouraged us to propose an efficient Home Energy Management System (HEMS) for optimal scheduling of home appliances. We propose a multi-objective optimization based solution that shifts the electricity load from On-peak to Off-peak hours according to the defined objective load curve for electricity. It aims to manage the trade-off between conflicting objectives: electricity bill, waiting time of appliances and electricity load shifting according to the defined electricity load pattern. The defined electricity load pattern helps in balancing the load during On-peak and Off-peak hours. Moreover, for real-time rescheduling, concept of coordination among home appliances is presented. This helps the scheduler to optimally decide the ON/OFF status of appliances to reduce the waiting time of the appliance. Whereas, electricity consumers have stochastic nature, for which, nature-inspired optimization techniques provide optimal solution. For optimal scheduling, we proposed two optimization techniques: binary multi-objective bird swarm optimization and a hybrid of bird swarm and cuckoo search algorithms to obtain the Pareto front. Moreover, dynamic programming is used to enable coordination among the appliances so that real-time scheduling can be performed by the scheduler on user's demand. To validate the performance of the proposed nature-based optimization techniques, we compare the results of proposed schemes with existing techniques such as multiobjective binary particle swarm optimization and multi-objective cuckoo search algorithms. Simulation results validate the performance of proposed techniques in terms of electricity cost reduction, peak to average ratio and waiting time minimization. Also, test functions for convex, non-convex and discontinuous Pareto front are implemented to prove the efficacy of proposed techniques.INDEX TERMS Coordination, dynamic programming, knapsack, multi-objective optimization, Pareto front, meta-heuristic, nature-inspired, bird swarm and cuckoo search algorithm, multi-objective bird swarm optimization, hybrid technique, demand side management, demand response, smart grid. ABBREVATIONS AMI Advanced Metering Infrastructure BSO Bird Swarm OptimizationThe associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Salvatore Favuzza .