A Survey of Home Energy Management for Residential Customers Ihsan Ullah Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Engineering & Technology, Peshawar, Pakistan. Abstract—The state of the art of old-age grids into smart grids provides residents the opportunity to schedule their appliances to consume the energy optimally that leads to potentially balance the demand side as well as the supply side more effectively and minimizes the power Peak-to-Average Ratio (PAR), which ultimately provides benefit to the residents in the form of reduction cost and expense. The Energy Management System (EMS) in the home receives the market and system signals and controls the loads, Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning systems (HVAC), storages and local generation units according to the user preferences. This survey encompasses novel home energy management techniques including different shiftable and non- shiftable load scheduling methods and peak shaving strategies. Several Pricing strategies have been suggested for smart grid such as, Real-Time Pricing (RTP), Time of Use (ToU), Inclining Block Rates (IBR), Critical Peak Pricing (CPP), etc. Moreover, this paper discusses the HEM architecture and reveals that the different energy management techniques intelligently schedule the appliances in order to satisfy the maximum resident’s comfort level and consume the energy optimally. Index Terms—Energy management, optimization techniques, real-time pricing, scheduling, smart grid. I. I NTRODUCTION Smart grid is a network of technologies that delivers elec- tricity from power plants to the end user and connects all sup- ply, grid and demand elements via an effective communication system. The achievement in the process of transformation from the traditional grid to the sustainable and an optimized energy system is the amalgamation of engineering, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), and management of the power grid. The improvements in ICT can be applied to enhance automation, combine distributed renewable resources, secure the power system architecture, and enable efficient demand-side energy management [1]. The smart grid emphasizes on four areas viz generation, transmission, distribution and consumers, and integrates elec- trical and digital technologies and ICTs for supplying the elec- tricity in much smarter and user friendly way. The performance of the smart power system involves a two way communication between the central controller and several system elements. The characteristics of the smart grid are that it is intelligent, efficient, economic, reliable, flexible, accommodating, quality focused and resilient [2]. Demand Side Management (DSM) is a significant part in the energy management of the future smart grid. The principle objective of the DSM is to flatten the demand curve either by expending less power during peak hours or by shifting the energy usage to off peak hours. The energy efficiency can be improved and the overall electricity consumption can be reduced by DSM. The system peak load demand and the operational cost are reduced by controlling the DSM in an efficient way. Real Time Electricity Pricing (RTEP) is one of the singular characteristic of smart grid and gives incentives to the residents by lessening their electricity cost via scheduling the pattern of their appliances. Residents may further tailor their electricity cost by shifting their loads from peak hours to off Peak hours. Various DSM systems are designed in the past which are able to handle the communication between the central controller and controllable loads. The smarter the monitoring and control, the more efficient the EMS will be created for the residents [3]. EMS is used in homes to schedule the electricity consump- tion in such a way that PAR and electricity cost is reduced to the maximum extent. The energy management techniques manage the household loads according to the preset priorities so that the user comfort level is achieved in addition to lowering the electricity cost. In this paper, various approaches and optimization paradigms for the energy management are discussed in detail to optimize the energy consumption to the utmost extent to reduce the PAR. Also, several pricing strategies are also discussed in details in order to benefit the residents by minimizing the electricity cost [ 2]. II. RELATED WORK Recently, residential energy management has become an active topic and several appliance scheduling strategies have been suggested. Some of the authors designed an automatic controller to schedule appliances to provide an optimum cost and others used the particle optimization technique to schedule the demands in an automated way. In [14] the author proposed simulated annealing based algorithm on the retailer side and considered the differential pricing in order to minimize the peak-to-average load demand ratio,maximize the utility’s profit and minimize the electricity cost of the resident. Different smart grid concepts, architectures, and the implemented tech- nologies are described in [5]. In this paper, drivers, visions and roadmaps used to develop the smart grid worldwide are briefly described. To develop smart and intelligent grids, various smart grid concepts are covered in this paper, i.e., development of virtual power plant, active demand in consumer networks, active distribution network and ICT applications. A smart power system is an evolution towards an optimized and a