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Internet of Things (IoT) and advanced communication technologies have demonstrated great potential to manage residential energy resources by enabling demand-side management (DSM). Home energy management systems (HEMSs) can automatically control electricity production and usage inside homes using DSM techniques. These HEMSs will wirelessly collect information from hardware installed in the power system and in homes with the objective to intelligently and efficiently optimize electricity usage and minimize costs. However, HEMSs can be vulnerable to cyberattacks that target the electricity pricing model. The cyberattacker manipulates the pricing information collected by a customer's HEMS to misguide its algorithms toward non-optimal solutions. The customer's electricity bill increases, and additional peaks are created without being detected by the system operator. This article introduces demand-response (DR)-based DSM in HEMSs and discusses DR optimization using heuristic algorithms. Moreover, it discusses the possibilities and impacts of cyberattacks, their effectiveness, and the degree of resilience of heuristic algorithms against cyberattacks. This article also opens research questions and shows prospective directions.

In this paper, we investigate the management of energy storage control and load scheduling in scenarios considering a grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) system using packetized energy management. The aim is to reduce an average aggregated system cost through the proposed \textit{packetized energy management controller} considering household energy consumption, procurement price, load scheduling delays, PV self-sufficiency via generated renewable energy and battery degradation. The proposed approach solves the joint optimization problem using established heuristics, namely genetic algorithm (GA), binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO), and differential evolution (DE). Additionally, the performances of heuristic algorithms are also compared in terms of the effectiveness of load scheduling with delay constraints, packetized energy transactions, and battery degradation cost. Case studies have been provided to demonstrate and extensively evaluate the algorithms. The numerical results show that the proposed packetized energy management controller can considerably reduce the aggregated average system cost up to 4.7\%, 5.14\%, and 1.35\% by GA, BPSO, and DE, respectively while meeting the packetized energy demand and scheduling delays requirements.

Digitalization has led to radical changes in the distribution of goods across various sectors. The tendency is to move from traditional buyer-seller markets to subscription-based on-demand "smart" matching platforms enabled by pervasive ICTs. The driving force behind this lies in the fact that assets, which were scarce in the past, are readily abundant, approaching a regime of zero marginal costs. This is also becoming a reality in electrified energy systems due to the substantial growth of distributed renewable energy sources such as solar and wind; the increasing number of small-scale storage units such as batteries and heat pumps; and the availability of flexible loads that enable demand-side management. In this context, this article proposes a system architecture based on a logical (cyber) association of spatially distributed (physical) elements as an approach to build a virtual microgrid operated as a software-defined energy network (SDEN) that is enabled by packetized energy management. The proposed cyber-physical system presumes that electrical energy is shared among its members and that the energy sharing is enabled in the cyber domain by handshakes inspired by resource allocation methods utilized in computer networks, wireless communications, and peer-to-peer Internet applications (e.g., BitTorrent). The proposal has twofold benefits: (i) reducing the complexity of current market-based solutions by removing unnecessary and costly mediations and (ii) guaranteeing energy access to all virtual microgrid members according to their individual needs. This article concludes that the proposed solution generally complies with the existing regulations but has highly disruptive potential to organize a dominantly electrified energy system in the mid- to long-term, being a technical counterpart to the recently developed social-oriented microgrid proposals., Comment: This paper was accepted to IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Magazine