A comprehensive overview on demand side energy management towards smart grids: challenges, solutions, and future direction

Demand-side management, a new development in smart grid technology, has enabled communication between energy suppliers and consumers. Demand side energy management (DSM) reduces the cost of energy acquisition and the associated penalties by continuously monitoring energy use and managing appliance schedules. Demand response (DR), distributed energy resources (DER), and energy efficiency (EE) are three categories of DSM activities that are growing in popularity as a result of technological advancements in smart grids. During the last century, the energy demand has grown significantly in tandem with the increase in the global population. This is related to the expansion of business, industry, agriculture, and the increasing use of electric vehicles. Because of the sharp increase in global energy consumption, it is currently extremely difficult to manage problems such as the characterization of home appliances, integration of intermittent renewable energy sources, load categorization, various constraints, dynamic pricing, and consumer categorization. To address these issues, it is critical to examine demand-side management (DSM), which has the potential to be a practical solution in all energy demand sectors, including residential, commercial, industrial, and agricultural. This paper has provided a detailed analysis of the different challenges associated with DSM, including technical, economic, and regulatory challenges, and has proposed a range of potential solutions to overcome these challenges. The PRISMA reviewing methodology is adopted based on relevant literature to focus on the issues identified as barriers to improving DSM functioning. The optimization techniques used in the literature to address the problem of energy management were discussed, and the hybrid techniques have shown a better performance due to their faster convergence speed. Gaps in future research and prospective paths have been briefly discussed to provide a comprehensive understanding of the current DSM implementation and the potential benefits it can offer for an energy management system. This comprehensive review of DSM will assist all researchers in this field in improving energy management strategies and reducing the effects of system uncertainties, variances, and restrictions. © 2023, The Author(s).