Energy Management-as-a-Service Over Fog Computing Platform

By introducing microgrids, energy management is required to control the power generation and consumption for residential, industrial, and commercial domains, e.g., in residential microgrids and homes. Energy management may also help us to reach zero net energy (ZNE) for the residential domain. Improvement in technology, cost, and feature size has enabled devices everywhere, to be connected and interactive, as it is called Internet of Things (IoT). The increasing complexity and data, due to the growing number of devices like sensors and actuators, require powerful computing resources, which may be provided by cloud computing. However, scalability has become the potential issue in cloud computing. In this paper, fog computing is introduced as a novel platform for energy management. The scalability, adaptability, and open source software/hardware featured in the proposed platform enable the user to implement the energy management with the customized control-as-services, while minimizing the implementation cost and time-to-market. To demonstrate the energy management-as-a-service over fog computing platform in different domains, two prototypes of home energy management (HEM) and microgrid-level energy management have been implemented and experimented.