Overview of home energy management systems architectures and techniques

Smart Grid is viewed as an improvement over the traditional power grid that is being used today. With the ever growing communities and cities that need to be connected to the power grids, and also the increase in the number of electrical appliances in the majority of homes, there is a serious concern regarding the ability of the current power suppliers to address everyone´s needs at all times. For this reason, it is vital to look for smarter ways to consume and produce electricity, both from a producer point of view and from the end users´. In the present paper, we present the concept of Home Energy Management System in relationship to the Smart Grid technology to better monitor and improve the energy consumption inside homes. The main concepts that we will be focusing on in this paper deal with the Energy Management Systems architecture and the Energy Management Techniques. We will first focus on the traditional Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition system before moving on to more recent Wireless Sensors Networks. Then we will address the most common techniques used for Energy Management inside Homes.