A Survey on Energy Efficiency in Smart Homes and Smart Grids

Empowered by the emergence of novel information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as sensors and high-performance digital communication systems, Europe has adapted its electricity distribution network into a modern infrastructure known as a smart grid (SG). The benefits of this new infrastructure include precise and real-time capacity for measuring and monitoring the different energy-relevant parameters on the various points of the grid and for the remote operation and optimization of distribution. Furthermore, a new user profile is derived from this novel infrastructure, known as a prosumer (a user that can produce and consume energy to/from the grid), who can benefit from the features derived from applying advanced analytics and semantic technologies in the rich amount of big data generated by the different subsystems. However, this novel, highly interconnected infrastructure also presents some significant drawbacks, like those related to information security (IS). We provide a systematic literature survey of the ICT-empowered environments that comprise SGs and homes, and the application of modern artificial intelligence (AI) related technologies with sensor fusion systems and actuators, ensuring energy efficiency in such systems. Furthermore, we outline the current challenges and outlook for this field. These address new developments on microgrids, and data-driven energy efficiency that leads to better knowledge representation and decision-making for smart homes and SGsThis research was co-funded by Interreg Österreich-Bayern 2014–2020 programme project KI-Net: Bausteine für KI-basierte Optimierungen in der industriellen Fertigung (AB 292). This work is also supported by the ITEA3 OPTIMUM project and ITEA3 SCRATCH project, all of them funded by the Centro Tecnológico de Desarrollo Industrial (CDTI), Spain

Middleware architectures for the smart grid: A survey on the state-of-the-art, taxonomy and main open issues

The integration of small-scale renewable energy sources in the smart grid depends on several challenges that must be overcome. One of them is the presence of devices with very different characteristics present in the grid or how they can interact among them in terms of interoperability and data sharing. While this issue is usually solved by implementing a middleware layer among the available pieces of equipment in order to hide any hardware heterogeneity and offer the application layer a collection of homogenous resources to access lower levels, the variety and differences among them make the definition of what is needed in each particular case challenging. This paper offers a description of the most prominent middleware architectures for the smart grid and assesses the functionalities they have, considering the performance and features expected from them in the context of this application domain