A Survey of Home Energy Management Systems in Future Smart Grid Communications

In this paper we present a systematic review of various home energy management (HEM) schemes. Employment of home energy management programs will make the electricity consumption smarter and more efficient. Advantages of HEM include, increased savings for consumers as well as utilities, reduced peak to average ratio (PAR) and peak demand. Where there are numerous applications of smart grid technologies, home energy management is probably the most important one to be addressed. Utilities across the globe have taken various steps for efficient consumption of electricity. New pricing schemes like, Real Time Pricing (RTP), Time of Use (ToU), Inclining Block Rates (IBR), Critical Peak Pricing (CPP) etc, have been proposed for smart grid. Distributed Energy Resources (DER) (local generation) and/or home appliances coordination along with different tariff schemes lead towards efficient consumption of electricity. This work also discusses a HEM system´s general architecture and various challenges in implementation of this architecture in smart grid.