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This research work aims at providing power quality improvement for the nonlinear load to improve the system performance indices by eliminating maximum total harmonic distortion (THD) and reducing neutral wire current. The idea is to integrate a shunt hybrid active power filter (SHAPF) with the system using machine learning control techniques. The system proposed has been evaluated under an artificial neural network (ANN), gated recurrent unit, and long short-term memory for the optimization of the SHAPF. The method is based on the detection of harmonic presence in the power system by testing and comparison of traditional pq0 theory and deep learning neural networks. The results obtained through the proposed methodology meet all the suggested international standards of THD. The results also satisfy the current removal from the neutral wire and deal efficiently with minor DC voltage variations occurring in the voltage-regulating current. The proposed algorithms have been evaluated on the performance indices of accuracy and computational complexities, which show effective results in terms of 99% accuracy and computational complexities. deep learning-based findings are compared based on their root-mean-square error (RMSE) and loss function. The proposed system can be applied for domestic and industrial load conditions in a four-wire three-phase power distribution system for harmonic mitigation.

Despite the benefits of smart grids, concerns about security and privacy arise when a large number of heterogeneous devices communicate via a public network. A novel privacy-preserving method for smart grid-based home area networks (HAN) is proposed in this research. To aggregate data from diverse household appliances, the proposed approach uses homomorphic Paillier encryption, Chinese remainder theorem, and one-way hash function. The privacy in Internet of things (IoT)-enabled smart homes is one of the major concerns of the research community. In the proposed scheme, the sink node not only aggregates the data but also enables the early detection of false data injection and replay attacks. According to the security analysis, the proposed approach offers adequate security. The smart grid distributes power and facilitates a two-way communications channel that leads to transparency and developing trust.

In many smart devices and numerous digital applications, authentication mechanisms are widely used to validate the legitimacy of users’ identification. As a result of the increased use of mobile devices, most people tend to save sensitive and secret information over such devices. Personal Identification Number (PIN)-based and alphanumeric passwords are simple to remember, but at the same time, they are vulnerable to hackers. Being difficult to guess and more user-friendly, graphical passwords have grown in popularity as an alternative to all such textual passwords. This paper describes an innovative, hybrid, and much more robust user authentication approach, named GRA-PIN (GRAphical and PIN-based), which combines the merits of both graphical and pin-based techniques. The feature of simple arithmetic operations (addition and subtraction) is incorporated in the proposed scheme, through which random passwords are generated for each login attempt. In the study, we have conducted a comparative study between the GRA-PIN scheme with existing PIN-based and pattern-based (swipe-based) authentications approaches using the standard Software Usability Scale (SUS). The usability score of GRA-PIN was analyzed to be as high as 94%, indicating that it is more reliable and user friendly. Furthermore, the security of the proposed scheme was challenged through an experiment wherein three different attackers, having a complete understanding of the proposed scheme, attempted to crack the technique via shoulder surfing, guessing, and camera attack, but they were unsuccessful.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are one of the fundamental infrastructures for Internet of Things (IoTs) technology. Efficient energy consumption is one of the greatest challenges in WSNs because of its resource-constrained sensor nodes (SNs). Clustering techniques can significantly help resolve this issue and extend the network’s lifespan. In clustering, WSN is divided into various clusters, and a cluster head (CH) is selected in each cluster. The selection of appropriate CHs highly influences the clustering technique, and poor cluster structures lead toward the early death of WSNs. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient clustering and cluster head selection technique for next-generation wireless sensor networks (NG-WSNs). The proposed clustering approach is based on the midpoint technique, considering residual energy and distance among nodes. It distributes the sensors uniformly creating balanced clusters, and uses multihop communication for distant CHs to the base station (BS). We consider a four-layer hierarchical network composed of SNs, CHs, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), and BS. The UAV brings the advantage of flexibility and mobility; it shortens the communication range of sensors, which leads to an extended lifetime. Finally, a simulated annealing algorithm is applied for the optimal trajectory of the UAV according to the ground sensor network. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms with respect to energy efficiency and network lifetime when compared with state-of-the-art techniques from recent literature.

Electrical power consumption and distribution and ensuring its quality are important for industries as the power sector mandates a clean and green process with the least possible carbon footprint and to avoid damage of expensive electrical components. The harmonics elimination has emerged as a topic of prime importance for researchers and industry to realize the maintenance of power quality in the light of the 7th Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This paper implements a Hybrid Shunt Active Harmonic Power Filter (HSAHPF) to reduce harmonic pollution. An ANN-based control algorithm has been used to implement Hardware in the Loop (HIL) configuration, and the network is trained on the model of pq0 theory. The HIL configuration is applied to integrate a physical processor with the designed filter. In this configuration, an external microprocessor (Raspberry PI 3B+) has been employed as a primary data server for the ANN-based algorithm to provide reference current signals for HSAHPF. The ANN model uses backpropagation and gradient descent to predict output based on seven received inputs, i.e., 3-phase source voltages, 3-phase applied load currents, and the compensated voltage across the DC-link capacitors of the designed filter. Moreover, a real-time data visualization has been provided through an Application Programming Interface (API) of a JAVA script called Node-RED. The Node-RED also performs data transmission between SIMULINK and external processors through serial socket TCP/IP data communication for real-time data transceiving. Furthermore, we have demonstrated a real-time Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system for testing HSAHPF using the topology based on HIL topology that enables the control algorithms to run on an embedded microprocessor for a physical system. The presented results validate the proposed design of the filter and the implementation of real-time system visualization. The statistical values show a significant decrease in Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) from 35.76% to 3.75%. These values perfectly lie within the set range of IEEE standard with improved stability time while bearing the computational overheads of the microprocessor.

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is a modern concept that enables network nodes to communicate and disseminate information. VANET is a heterogeneous network, due to which the VANET environment exposes to have various security and privacy challenges. In the future, the automobile industry will progress towards assembling electric vehicles containing energy storage batteries employing these resources to travel as an alternative to gasoline/petroleum. These vehicles may have the capability to share their energy resources upon the request of vehicles having limited energy resources. In this article, we have proposed a trust management-based secure energy sharing mechanism, named vTrust, which computes the trust degree of nodes to authenticate nodes. The proposed mechanism is a multi-leveled centralized approach utilizing both the infrastructure and vehicles to sustain a secure environment. The proposed vTrust can aggregate and propagate the degree of trust to enhance scalability. The node that requests to obtain the energy resources may have to maintain a specified level of trust threshold for earning resources. We have also evaluated the performance of the proposed mechanism against several existing approaches and determine that the proposed mechanism can efficiently manage a secure environment during resource sharing by maintaining average malicious nodes detection of 91.3% and average successful energy sharing rate of 89.5%, which is significantly higher in comparison to the existing approaches.

Recently, many platforms have outsourced tasks to numerous smartphone devices known as Mobile Crowd-sourcing System (MCS). The data is collected and transferred to the platform for further analysis and processing. These data needs to maintain confidentiality while moving from smartphones to the platform. Moreover, the limitations of computation resources in smartphones need to be addressed to balance the confidentiality of the data and the capabilities of the devices. For this reason, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is accepted, widespread, and suitable for use in limited resources environments such as smartphone devices. ECC reduces energy consumption and maximizes devices’ efficiency by using small crypto keys with the same strength of the required cryptography of other cryptosystems. Thus, ECC is the preferred approach for many environments, including the MCS, Internet of Things (IoT) and wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Many implementations of ECC increase the process of encryption and/or increase the space overhead by, for instance, incorrectly mapping points to EC with extra padding bits. Moreover, the wrong mapping method used in ECC results in increasing the computation efforts. This study provides comprehensive details about the mapping techniques used in the ECC mapping phase, and presents performance results about widely used elliptic curves. In addition, it suggests an optimal enhanced mapping method and size of padding bit to secure communications that guarantee the successful mapping of points to EC and reduce the size of padding bits.

The health industry is one of the most auspicious domains for the application of Internet of Things (IoT) based technologies. Lots of studies have been carried out in the health industry field to minimize the use of resources and increase the efficiency. The use of IoT combined with other technologies has brought quality advancement in the health sector at minimum expense. One such technology is the use of wireless body area networks (WBANs), which will help patients incredibly in the future and will make them more productive because there will be no need for staying at home or a hospital for a long time. WBANs and IoT have an integrated future as WBANs, like any IoT application, are a collection of heterogeneous sensor-based devices. For the better amalgamation of the IoT and WBANs, several hindrances blocking their integration need to be addressed. One such problem is the efficient routing of data in limited resource sensor nodes (SNs) in WBANs. To solve this and other problems, such as transmission of duplicate sensed data, limited network lifetime, etc., energy harvested and cooperative-enabled efficient routing protocol (EHCRP) for IoT-WBANs is proposed. The proposed protocol considers multiple parameters of WBANs for efficient routing such as residual energy of SNs, number of hops towards the sink, node congestion levels, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and available network bandwidth. A path cost estimation function is calculated to select forwarder node using these parameters. Due to the efficient use of the path-cost estimation process, the proposed mechanism achieves efficient and effective multi-hop routing of data and improves the reliability and efficiency of data transmission over the network. After extensive simulations, the achieved results of the proposed protocol are compared with state-of-the-art techniques, i.e., E-HARP, EB-MADM, PCRP and EERP. The results show significant improvement in network lifetime, network throughout, and end-to-end delay.

Smartness and agility are two quality measures that are pragmatic to achieve a flexible, maintainable, and adaptable system in any business. The automotive industry also requires an enhanced performance matrix and refinement in the development strategies for manufacturing. The current development models used in automotive manufacturing are not optimal enough; thus, the overall expenditure is not properly managed. Therefore, it is essential to come up with flexible, agile techniques incorporating traceability methods. It overcomes the traditional manufacturing approaches that are usually inflexible, costly, and lack timely customer feedback. The article focuses on significant Requirements Management (RM) activities, including traceability mechanism, smart manufacturing process, and performance evaluation of the proposed methods in the automotive domain. We propose a manufacturing framework that follows smart agile principles along with proper traceability management. Our proposed approach overcomes the complexities generated by traditional manufacturing processes in automotive industries. It gives an insight into the future manufacturing processes in the automotive industries.

Advertising over smart devices is one of the growing trends in the information technology domain. Most of the Android application (app) developers generate revenue through the use of ads, but on the other hand, the end users get the free app. However, the excessive number of ads infers hidden costs with respect to energy consumption, network utilization, and user comfort. These factors affect the app rating and reviews. Consequently, developers require a technique to balance app performance through optimized mobile ad usage. Therefore, in this paper, we extend an existing work and propose an energy-efficient method that uses gamma correction to reduce the hidden costs of a mobile app. In this approach, gamma correction efficiently balances the app performance by minimizing the size of ads. The size of the mobile ad is reduced by adjusting its pixels, reducing background color, and illuminating the content of the ad. After several experiments, it is deduced that our proposed approach efficiently saves mobile battery and developers can apply this approach to improve app rank and feedback.

Internet of Things (IoT) provides a diverse platform to automate things where smart agriculture is one of the most promising concepts in the field of Internet of Agriculture Things (IoAT). Due to the requirements of more processing power for computations and predictions, the concept of Cloud-based smart agriculture is proposed for autonomic systems. This is where digital innovation and technology helps to improve the quality of life in the area of urbanization expansion. For the integration of cloud in smart agriculture, the system is shown to have security and privacy challenges, and most significantly, the identification of malicious and compromised nodes along with a secure transmission of information between sensors, cloud, and base station (BS). The identification of malicious and compromised node among soil sensors communicating with the BS is a notable challenge in the BS to cloud communications. The trust management mechanism is proposed as one of the solutions providing a lightweight approach to identify these nodes. In this article, we have proposed a novel trust management mechanism to identify malicious and compromised nodes by utilizing trust parameters. The trust mechanism is an event-driven process that computes trust based on the pre-defined time interval and utilizes the previous trust degree to develop an absolute trust degree. The system also maintains the trust degree of a BS and cloud service providers using distinct approaches. We have also performed extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanism against several potential attacks. In addition, this research helps to create friendlier environments and efficient agricultural productions for the migration of people to the cities.

Recent growth in the Internet of Things (IoT) has raised security concerns over the confidentiality of data exchanged between IoT devices and the edge. Many IoT systems adopt asymmetric cryptography to secure their data and communications. A drawback of asymmetric cryptography is the sizeable computation and space requirements. However, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is widely used in constrained environments for asymmetric cryptography due its superiority in generating a powerful encryption mechanism with small key sizes. ECC increases device performance and lowers power consumption, meaning it is suitable for diverse applications ranging from the IoT to wireless sensor network (WSN) devices. To ensure the confidentiality and security of data and communications, it is necessary to implement ECC robustly. A special area of focus in this regard is the mapping phase. This study’s objective was to propose a tested and trusted scheme that offers authenticated encryption (AE) via enhancing the mapping phase of a plain text to an elliptic curve to resist several encryption attacks such as Chosen Plaintext Attack (CPA) and Chosen Ciphertext Attack (CCA). The proposed scheme also undertakes evaluation and analysis related to security requirements for specific encryption attributes. Finally, results from a comparison of the proposed scheme and other schemes are presented, evaluating each one’s security characteristics and performance measurements. Our scheme is efficient in a way that makes so suitable to the IoT, and in particular to the Industrial IoT and the new Urbanization where the demands for services are huge.

In recent times, the field of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has attained a growing popularity in observing the environment due to its dynamic factors. Sensor data are gathered and forwarded to the base station (BS) through a wireless transmission medium. The data from the BS is further distributed to end-users using the Internet for their post analysis and operations. However, all sensors except the BS have limited constraints in terms of memory, energy and computational resources that degrade the network performance concerning the network lifetime and trustworthy routing. Therefore, improving energy efficiency with reliable and secure transmissions is a valuable debate among researchers for critical applications based on low-powered sensor nodes. In addition, security plays a significant cause to achieve responsible communications among sensors due to their unfixed and variable infrastructures. Keeping in view the above-mentioned issues, this paper presents an energy-aware graph clustering and intelligent routing (EGCIR) using a supervised system for WSNs to balance the energy consumption and load distribution. Moreover, a secure and efficient key distribution in a hierarchy-based mechanism is adopted by the proposed solution to improve the network efficacy in terms of routes and links integrity. The experimental results demonstrated that the EGCIR protocol enhances the network throughput by an average of 14%, packet drop ratio by an average of 50%, energy consumption by an average of 13%, data latency by an average of 30.2% and data breaches by an average of 37.5% than other state-of-the-art protocols.

Nowadays, the integration of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and the Internet of Things (IoT) provides a great concern for the research community for enabling advanced services. An IoT network may comprise a large number of heterogeneous smart devices for gathering and forwarding huge data. Such diverse networks raise several research questions, such as processing, storage, and management of massive data. Furthermore, IoT devices have restricted constraints and expose to a variety of malicious network attacks. This paper presents a Secure Sensor Cloud Architecture (SASC) for IoT applications to improve network scalability with efficient data processing and security. The proposed architecture comprises two main phases. Firstly, network nodes are grouped using unsupervised machine learning and exploit weighted-based centroid vectors for the development of intelligent systems. Secondly, the proposed architecture makes the use of sensor-cloud infrastructure for boundless storage and consistent service delivery. Furthermore, the sensor-cloud infrastructure is protected against malicious nodes by using a mathematically unbreakable one-time pad (OTP) encryption scheme to provide data security. To evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture, different simulation experiments are conducted using Network Simulator (NS3). It has been observed through experimental results that the proposed architecture outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches in terms of network lifetime, packet drop ratio, energy consumption, and transmission overhead.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have demonstrated research and developmental interests in numerous fields, like communication, agriculture, industry, smart health, monitoring, and surveillance. In the area of agriculture production, IoT-based WSN has been used to observe the yields condition and automate agriculture precision using various sensors. These sensors are deployed in the agricultural environment to improve production yields through intelligent farming decisions and obtain information regarding crops, plants, temperature measurement, humidity, and irrigation systems. However, sensors have limited resources concerning processing, energy, transmitting, and memory capabilities that can negatively impact agriculture production. Besides efficiency, the protection and security of these IoT-based agricultural sensors are also important from malicious adversaries. In this article, we proposed an IoT-based WSN framework as an application to smart agriculture comprising different design levels. Firstly, agricultural sensors capture relevant data and determine a set of cluster heads based on multi-criteria decision function. Additionally, the strength of the signals on the transmission links is measured while using signal to noise ratio (SNR) to achieve consistent and efficient data transmissions. Secondly, security is provided for data transmission from agricultural sensors towards base stations (BS) while using the recurrence of the linear congruential generator. The simulated results proved that the proposed framework significantly enhanced the communication performance as an average of 13.5% in the network throughput, 38.5% in the packets drop ratio, 13.5% in the network latency, 16% in the energy consumption, and 26% in the routing overheads for smart agriculture, as compared to other solutions.

The International Energy Agency has projected that the total energy demand for electricity in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is expected to rise by an average of 4% per year up to 2040. It implies that ~620 million people are living without electricity in SSA. Going with the 2030 vision of the United Nations that electricity should be accessible to all, it is important that new technology and methods are provided. In comparison to other nations worldwide, smart grid (SG) is an emerging technology in SSA. SG is an information technology-enhanced power grid, which provides a two-way communication network between energy producers and customers. Also, it includes renewable energy, smart meters, and smart devices that help to manage energy demands and reduce energy generation costs. However, SG is facing inherent difficulties, such as energy theft, lack of trust, security, and privacy issues. Therefore, this paper proposes a blockchain-based decentralized energy system (BDES) to accelerate rural and urban electrification by improving service delivery while minimizing the cost of generation and addressing historical antipathy and cybersecurity risk within SSA. Additionally, energy insufficiency and fixed pricing schemes may raise concerns in SG, such as the imbalance of order. The paper also introduces a blockchain-based energy trading system, which includes price negotiation and incentive mechanisms to address the imbalance of order. Moreover, existing models for energy planning do not consider the effect of fill rate (FR) and service level (SL). A blockchain levelized cost of energy (BLCOE) is proposed as the least-cost solution that measures the impact of energy reliability on generation cost using FR and SL. Simulation results are presented to show the performance of the proposed model and the least-cost option varies with relative energy generation cost of centralized, decentralized and BDES infrastructure. Case studies of Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Gambia, Liberia, Mali, and Senegal illustrate situations that are more suitable for BDES. For other SSA countries, BDES can cost-effectively service a large population and regions. Additionally, BLCOE reduces energy costs by approximately 95% for battery and 75% for the solar modules. The future BLCOE varies across SSA on an average of about 0.049 $/kWh as compared to 0.15 $/kWh of an existing system in the literature.

In this paper, a blockchain-based data sharing and access control system is proposed, for communication between the Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The proposed system is intended to overcome the issues related to trust and authentication for access control in IoT networks. Moreover, the objectives of the system are to achieve trustfulness, authorization, and authentication for data sharing in IoT networks. Multiple smart contracts such as Access Control Contract (ACC), Register Contract (RC), and Judge Contract (JC) are used to provide efficient access control management. Where ACC manages overall access control of the system, and RC is used to authenticate users in the system, JC implements the behavior judging method for detecting misbehavior of a subject (i.e., user). After the misbehavior detection, a penalty is defined for that subject. Several permission levels are set for IoT devices’ users to share services with others. In the end, performance of the proposed system is analyzed by calculating cost consumption rate of smart contracts and their functions. A comparison is made between existing and proposed systems. Results show that the proposed system is efficient in terms of cost. The overall execution cost of the system is 6,900,000 gas units and the transaction cost is 5,200,000 gas units.

The problem of moving target tracking in directional sensor networks (DSNs) introduces new research challenges, including optimal selection of sensing and communication sectors of the directional sensor nodes, determination of the precise location of the target and an energy-efficient data collection mechanism. Existing solutions allow individual sensor nodes to detect the target’s location through collaboration among neighboring nodes, where most of the sensors are activated and communicate with the sink. Therefore, they incur much overhead, loss of energy and reduced target tracking accuracy. In this paper, we have proposed a clustering algorithm, where distributed cluster heads coordinate their member nodes in optimizing the active sensing and communication directions of the nodes, precisely determining the target location by aggregating reported sensing data from multiple nodes and transferring the resultant location information to the sink. Thus, the proposed target tracking mechanism minimizes the sensing redundancy and maximizes the number of sleeping nodes in the network. We have also investigated the dynamic approach of activating sleeping nodes on-demand so that the moving target tracking accuracy can be enhanced while maximizing the network lifetime. We have carried out our extensive simulations in ns-3, and the results show that the proposed mechanism achieves higher performance compared to the state-of-the-art works.

Elderly people constitute a major portion of world’s population. Many of them are physically and mentally vulnerable and need continuous support for their health and well-being. There is a growing trend that these elderly people are placed in an ambient assisted living environment (AAL) with an aim to receive better care and support. In such settings, a lot of attention has been given to continuous health monitoring for maintaining physical health status. However, much less attention has been given toward understanding the entertainment needs of the elderly people, which is an important factor relevant to their mental health and joyful living. This paper thus addresses the entertainment needs of the elderly and proposes a framework of an elderly entertainment support system. The proposed framework enables different categories of residents (e.g., elderly people and caregivers) to access various media services in both implicit and explicit manner in order to enhance the quality of their living experience in different contexts. Our experimental results demonstrate the viability of the proposed framework. We believe that the proposed approach will establish the need to develop entertainment systems and services for the elderly people and allow us to sensibly address the problems associated with their independent, happy and active living.

Due to the advancement of information and communication technologies, the use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has increased exponentially. In the development of IoT, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) perform a vital part and comprises of low-cost smart devices for information gathering. However, such smart devices have constraints in terms of computation, processing, memory and energy resources. Along with such constraints, one of the fundamental challenges for WSN is to achieve reliability with the security of transmitted data in a vulnerable environment against malicious nodes. This paper aims to develop an energy-efficient and secure routing protocol (ESR) for intrusion avoidance in IoT based on WSN to increase the network period and data trustworthiness. Firstly, the proposed protocol creates different energy-efficient clusters based on the intrinsic qualities of nodes. Secondly, based on the (k,n) threshold-based Shamir secret sharing scheme, the reliability and security of the sensory information among the base station (BS) and cluster head are achieved. The proposed security scheme presents a light-weight solution to cope with intrusions generated by malicious nodes. The experimental results using the network simulator (NS-2) demonstrate that the proposed routing protocol achieved improvement in terms of network lifetime as 37%, average end-to-end delay as 24%, packet delivery ratio as 30%, average communication cost as 29%, network overhead as 28% and the frequency of route re-discoveries as 38% when compared with the existing work under dynamic network topologies.

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a growing area of research in terms of applications, life enhancement and security. Research interests vary from enhancing network performance and decreasing overhead computation to solving security flaws. Secure Group Communication (SGC) is gaining traction in the world of network security. Proposed solutions in this area focus on generating, sharing and distributing a group key among all group members in a timely manner to secure their communication and reduce the computation overhead. This method of security is called SGC-Shared Key. In this paper, we introduce a simple and effective way to secure the network through Hashed IDs (SGC-HIDs). In our proposed method, we distribute a shared key among the group of nodes in the network. Each node would have the ability to compute the group key each time it needs to. We provide a security analysis for our method as well as a performance evaluation. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, we present for the first time a definition of joining or leaving attack. Furthermore, we describe several types of such an attack as well as the potential security impacts that occur when a network is being attacked.

Microgrid is a community-based power generation and distribution system that interconnects smart homes with renewable energy sources (RESs). Microgrid efficiently and economically generates power for electricity consumers and operates in both islanded and grid-connected modes. In this study, we proposed optimization schemes for reducing electricity cost and minimizing peak to average ratio (PAR) with maximum user comfort (UC) in a smart home. We considered a grid-connected microgrid for electricity generation which consists of wind turbine and photovoltaic (PV) panel. First, the problem was mathematically formulated through multiple knapsack problem (MKP) then solved by existing heuristic techniques: grey wolf optimization (GWO), binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO), genetic algorithm (GA) and wind-driven optimization (WDO). Furthermore, we also proposed three hybrid schemes for electric cost and PAR reduction: (1) hybrid of GA and WDO named WDGA; (2) hybrid of WDO and GWO named WDGWO; and (3) WBPSO, which is the hybrid of BPSO and WDO. In addition, a battery bank system (BBS) was also integrated to make our proposed schemes more cost-efficient and reliable, and to ensure stable grid operation. Finally, simulations were performed to verify our proposed schemes. Results show that our proposed scheme efficiently minimizes the electricity cost and PAR. Moreover, our proposed techniques, WDGA, WDGWO and WBPSO, outperform the existing heuristic techniques.

With the emergence of automated environments, energy demand by consumers is increasing rapidly. More than 80% of total electricity is being consumed in the residential sector. This brings a challenging task of maintaining the balance between demand and generation of electric power. In order to meet such challenges, a traditional grid is renovated by integrating two-way communication between the consumer and generation unit. To reduce electricity cost and peak load demand, demand side management (DSM) is modeled as an optimization problem, and the solution is obtained by applying meta-heuristic techniques with different pricing schemes. In this paper, an optimization technique, the hybrid gray wolf differential evolution (HGWDE), is proposed by merging enhanced differential evolution (EDE) and gray wolf optimization (GWO) scheme using real-time pricing (RTP) and critical peak pricing (CPP). Load shifting is performed from on-peak hours to off-peak hours depending on the electricity cost defined by the utility. However, there is a trade-off between user comfort and cost. To validate the performance of the proposed algorithm, simulations have been carried out in MATLAB. Results illustrate that using RTP, the peak to average ratio (PAR) is reduced to 53.02%, 29.02% and 26.55%, while the electricity bill is reduced to 12.81%, 12.012% and 12.95%, respectively, for the 15-, 30- and 60-min operational time interval (OTI). On the other hand, the PAR and electricity bill are reduced to 47.27%, 22.91%, 22% and 13.04%, 12%, 11.11% using the CPP tariff.

In a smart grid, several optimization techniques have been developed to schedule load in the residential area. Most of these techniques aim at minimizing the energy consumption cost and the comfort of electricity consumer. Conversely, maintaining a balance between two conflicting objectives: energy consumption cost and user comfort is still a challenging task. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to minimize the electricity cost and user discomfort while taking into account the peak energy consumption. In this regard, we implement and analyse the performance of a traditional dynamic programming (DP) technique and two heuristic optimization techniques: genetic algorithm (GA) and binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) for residential load management. Based on these techniques, we propose a hybrid scheme named GAPSO for residential load scheduling, so as to optimize the desired objective function. In order to alleviate the complexity of the problem, the multi dimensional knapsack is used to ensure that the load of electricity consumer will not escalate during peak hours. The proposed model is evaluated based on two pricing schemes: day-ahead and critical peak pricing for single and multiple days. Furthermore, feasible regions are calculated and analysed to develop a relationship between power consumption, electricity cost, and user discomfort. The simulation results are compared with GA, BPSO and DP, and validate that the proposed hybrid scheme reflects substantial savings in electricity bills with minimum user discomfort. Moreover, results also show a phenomenal reduction in peak power consumption.

Today’s buildings are responsible for about 40% of total energy consumption and 30–40% of carbon emissions, which are key concerns for the sustainable development of any society. The excessive usage of grid energy raises sustainability issues in the face of global changes, such as climate change, population, economic growths, etc. Traditionally, the power systems that deliver this commodity are fuel operated and lead towards high carbon emissions and global warming. To overcome these issues, the recent concept of the nearly zero energy building (nZEB) has attracted numerous researchers and industry for the construction and management of the new generation buildings. In this regard, this paper proposes various demand side management (DSM) programs using the genetic algorithm (GA), teaching learning-based optimization (TLBO), the enhanced differential evolution (EDE) algorithm and the proposed enhanced differential teaching learning algorithm (EDTLA) to manage energy and comfort, while taking the human preferences into consideration. Power consumption patterns of shiftable home appliances are modified in response to the real-time price signal in order to get monetary benefits. To further improve the cost and user discomfort objectives along with reduced carbon emission, renewable energy sources (RESs) are also integrated into the microgrid (MG). The proposed model is implemented in a smart residential complex of multiple homes under a real-time pricing environment. We figure out two feasible regions: one for electricity cost and the other for user discomfort. The proposed model aims to deal with the stochastic nature of RESs while introducing the battery storage system (BSS). The main objectives of this paper include: (1) integration of RESs; (2) minimization of the electricity bill (cost) and discomfort; and (3) minimizing the peak to average ratio (PAR) and carbon emission. Additionally, we also analyze the tradeoff between two conflicting objectives, like electricity cost and user discomfort. Simulation results validate both the implemented and proposed techniques.