Energy Conversion and Management 237 (2021) 114103

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Energy Conversion and Management

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/enconman

A multi-objective predictive energy management strategy for residential

grid-connected PV-battery hybrid systems based on machine
learning technique
Kumar Shivam a, b, *, Jong-Chyuan Tzou a, Shang-Chen Wu a
a
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Kun Shan University, No. 195, Kunda Rd., Yongkang Dist., Tainan City 710, Taiwan
b
Precision Machinery Research & Development Center (PMC), No. 27, 37th Road, Taichung Industrial Park, Taichung 40768, Taiwan

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: This paper proposes a multi-objective predictive energy management strategy based on machine learning
Energy management strategy technique for residential grid-connected hybrid energy systems. The hybrid system considered in this study
Hybrid energy systems comprise three principal components: a photovoltaic array as a renewable energy source, a battery bank as an
Machine learning
energy storage system, and residential building as an electric load. The proposed strategy comprises three levels
Multiobjective evolutionary algorithm
Predictive control
of controls: a logical level to manage the computational load and accuracy, a dual prediction model based on
Time-series forecasting residual causal dilated convolutional networks for energy production and electric load on system, and a multi-
objective optimization for efficient trade of energy with the utility grid by battery charge scheduling. The pre­
diction model used in this study can provide one-step ahead photovoltaic energy production and load forecast
with sufficient accuracy using a sliding window training technique and can be implemented on an average
personal computer. The energy management problem comprises multiple objectives that include minimization of
energy bought from utility grid, maximization the battery bank’s state-of-charge and reduction of carbon dioxide
emission. The optimization problem is constrained to the maximum allowed carbon dioxide production and
battery bank’s state-of-charge limits. The proposed strategy is tested for static and dynamic electricity prices
using hourly energy and load data. Simulation results show a high coefficient of determination of 93.08% for
energy production predictions and 97.25% for electric load predictions using proposed dual prediction model.
The proposed prediction model is benchmarked against naïve prediction, support vector machine and artificial
neural network models using several metrics and shows noticeable improvements in prediction accuracy. Not
only the proposed strategy combined with the proposed prediction model can handle over 50% of the total yearly
load requirement but also shows a significant decrease in electricity bill and carbon dioxide compared to resi­
dential buildings without hybrid energy systems and hybrid energy system without energy management strategy.

1. Introduction
The hybrid energy systems (HES) are gaining popularity among
residential users because of lower installation and operation cost in
recent years. The residential HES comprises several renewable energy
sources such as PV, wind turbines, micro-turbines and geothermal. The
energy storage systems (ESS) like battery bank, fuel cell and/or super
capacitors are often used together with the HES for storing excess en­
ergy. Photovoltaic (PV) and battery bank based HES systems are most
popular because they are easy to install and require less capital invest­
ment among other renewable energy options. Combined with bidirec­
tional connection with utility grid, also known as “grid-connected
mode”, a PV-battery HES can provide sufficient reliability and enable
trade of excess energy generated. Grid-connected hybrid energy systems
(GCHES) like PV-battery systems enable residential users to not only
decrease the environmental impact of electricity consumptions but also
provide means to decrease the monthly utility bills. Therefore, energy
management strategies are deployed to maximize the efficiency of such
systems.
To efficiently manage the energy generated by GCHES, model pre­
dictive control (MPC) methods are one of the popular choices among
researchers. Since MPC can incorporate feedback mechanism for the
model’s uncertainties and uses forecasting method to handle future
demand and power generation, it is widely used for economic

* Corresponding author at: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Kun Shan University, No. 195, Kunda Rd., Yongkang Dist., Tainan City 710, Taiwan.
E-mail address: s106002443@g.ksu.edu.tw (K. Shivam).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enconman.2021.114103
Received 28 September 2020; Accepted 26 March 2021
Available online 8 April 2021
0196-8904/© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
K. Shivam et al.
optimization of HES. In [1], different aspects of energy management
systems in micro grids and MPC are discussed. Recent studies exten­
sively focus on the economic objectives of MPC for micro grids. A multi-
objective MPC strategy is proposed in [2] for grid-connected solar-wind
HES with pumped hydro storage. Multi-objective performance indexes
are handled by linearization of the optimization problem, and time-of-
use tariff is used as the input of the control system. [3] introduces a
multi-agent multi-objective energy management technique considering
electricity bills, power purchase from grid and power quality. This study
showed and 2–6.5% reduction in electricity bills. In [4], a novel rule-
based multi-objective energy management is presented for off-grid
micro-grid, which is optimized using grasshopper optimization algo­
rithm. This approach showed a reduction of fuel consumption up to
92.4% and carbon dioxide (CO2) emission by 92.3%. A multi-objective
energy management for HES and battery EES is presented in [5] for
attaining optimal capacity of PV, wind turbine, diesel generator, micro-
turbine, fuel cell and battery with considering several objectives such as
cost of energy, fuel cost, charging/discharging schedule and penalty of
greenhouse gas emissions. This strategy was shown to reduce 51.60% of
CO2 emission against traditional system for a standalone HES.
Many advanced energy management strategies (EMS) are also
introduced in recent years for micro grids [6–8]. [9] proposes an
autonomous scheduler system for residential buildings, which helps
decrease the total power consumption when used with solar PV system.
Also, in [7], a supply demand energy management strategy is introduced
for off-grid HES for residential buildings, which shows improvements
over only supply side management strategy. In [10], a hybrid squirrel
search algorithm with whale optimization algorithm is proposed to
handle the energy management of HES consisting of PV, wind turbine
generator, battery and fuel cell. In [11], a review of several optimization
methods of energy management is presented. Several nature-inspired
algorithms including genetic algorithm, particle-swarm optimization,
differential evolution and Fuzzy logic is reviewed. Genetic algorithms
and particle swarm optimization techniques are popular among re­
searches for their ability to find global optimum solutions.
Most of the MPC and other predictive energy management system
(PEMS) techniques rely upon the accurate prediction of future demand/
load and energy generation [12–15]. Many PV power forecasting algo­
rithms use advance machine learning techniques to predict the future PV
power production data. In [16], a LSTM-RNN model is proposed to
tackle the conventional machine learning deficiencies like over-fitting
and generalization. The review of several studies presented in [17] for
the photovoltaic energy generation forecasting techniques, it can be
pointed out that artificial neural networks can predict PV generation
data with high accuracy. However, from [17–19], most of the fore­
casting models require significant amount of the historical data to pro­
vide good prediction accuracy. In other field of studies such as wind
speed prediction, water level forecasting, seismic forecasting, dilated
and causal variants of convolutional neural networks model has proven
to provide higher accuracy other machine learning models with limited
amount of historical data [20–24].
This study is motivated by the shortcoming of HES systems without
EMS techniques which includes unnecessary storage of excess energy in
battery banks, which leads to reduced efficiency in energy trading for
grid-connected HES. The goal for this study is to reduce amount of the
unnecessary energy storage by optimally scheduling battery charge and
decrease the energy cost by increasing the frequency of excess energy
trade with the utility grid. In this paper, we propose a multi-objective
predictive energy management strategy for grid-connected PV-battery
HES. This study uses a 1-hour horizon for both prediction and optimi­
zation tasks. We deploy a pair residual dilated causal convolutional
network (Res-DCCN) for the parallel forecasting of one-step ahead en­
ergy production and load using a sliding window technique to tackle the
forecasting problem with limited historical data (168 h). Multi-objective
optimization problem is formulated using maximum state-of-charge
(SoC) limit of the battery bank as input. Objectives considered for
2
Energy Conversion and Management 237 (2021) 114103
optimization include total cost of electricity, SoC limit, CO2 emissions
and the problem is constrained to maximum allowed CO2 emission at
each energy management step. In summary:
A multi-objective predictive energy management strategy is pro­
posed for residential grid-connected PV-battery HES using three-level
control method for EMS: monitoring including logic/rule and machine
learning, multi-objective optimization and PV-battery system power
distribution including trade.
Parallel forecasting model is used for predicting the one-step ahead
energy production and load. A variant of Res-DCCN is deployed as the
prediction model to improve prediction accuracy on limited historical
data and sliding window technique is used for model training and
prediction.
Proposed forecasting model is benchmarked against traditional
forecasting methods including naïve/persistence prediction, support
vector machine (SVM) regression and artificial neural network (ANN).
Proposed strategy is benchmarked using simulation for static and
dynamic electric prices in Taiwan area.
Using proposed strategy, the cost of electricity can be dynamically
decreased compared to traditional systems while reducing the CO2
emissions. Also, the proposed strategy together with dual-Res-DCCN
prediction model shows superior performance than other prediction
models used for benchmarking.
The paper is structured as follows: in Section 2, the mathematical
models of the photovoltaic system, the battery bank and the grid-
connected HES are discussed. Section 3 provides the details of the pro­
posed multi-objective predictive control strategy, including Res-DCCN
and problem formulation. In Section 4, we discuss the accuracy of the
forecasting model and results of proposed strategy on static and dynamic
energy pricing cases. A comparison of proposed methodology with
several related EMS strategies is discussed in Section 5. Lastly, conclu­
sions are presented in Section 6.
2. Mathematical models
This section describes the mathematical models of PV system and
battery bank. The operational outline of grid-connected PV-battery HES
for residential building is also presented. The climatological data is used
to compute the PV system’s power output that is used in the case study.
2.1. Photovoltaic system
The power output of the PV array (Ppv ) can be calculated as a func­
tion of solar irradiance and ambient temperature (Tamb ) At given time
step t, the Ppv can be computed using following equations [25]:
( )[ ( )]
Ppv = Npv × Prpv G/Gref 1 + T cof T c − T ref , (1)
T c = T amb + ((T noct − 20)/800)×G) (2)
where Prpv is the rated power output of the PV modules. Npv represents
the total number of PV modules in the PV array. G represents the solar
irradiance (W/m2) and solar irradiance at reference conditions with the
value of 1000 (W/m2) is shown as Gref . T c is used to denote the solar cell
temperature and Tref is the solar cell temperature at standard test con­
ditions set as 25 ◦ C. T cof is the temperature coefficient, − 3.8 × 10–3 (1/
◦
C) for polycrystalline PV modules [26]. Tc can be calculated as a
function of ambient temperature T amb , nominal operating cell temper­
ature T noct and solar irradiance G. In this study, a PV array of 44 poly­
crystalline PV modules is considered with a combined maximum rated
power of 14,520 (W). Polycrystalline PV module used for simulating the
PV system’s power output comprises 72-cells rated at 16.92% maximum
efficiency by Motech Industries (IM72CB-330). The technical parame­
ters of the PV modules can be found at [27].
K. Shivam et al. Energy Conversion and Management 237 (2021) 114103

2.2. Battery bank 2.3. Grid-connected PV-battery system

Battery banks are most popular choice for the storing excess energy This study considers a residential building equipped with PV arrays
generated by HES, in this case PV system. This stored energy is thereafter as renewable energy generation source and lead-acid battery bank for
used to compensate for the energy requirement by the load when the PV energy storage. This configuration operates in grid-connected mode that
system cannot meet the energy demand. In this paper, we use lead-acid enables the trade of energy with the utility grid. The PV energy gener­
batteries to model our battery bank. The battery bank’s state-of-charge ation system and battery bank are connected to each other through a
(SoC) determines the quantity of stored energy. The state-of-charge of predictive energy management strategy (PEMS) controller. The
the battery at time step t, SoCt can be computed as following equations controller is also connected to the utility grid through a smart meter via
[28]. circuit breaker that enables the exchange of energy from the grid. The
( ) circuit breaker acts as the safety and manual switching interface be­
Pt × t
SoCt (Pt ) = (1 − ηsd ) SoCt− 1 + × ηbat , SoCmin ≤ SoCt tween grid and PEMS controller. The PEMS controller manages the load
Nbat × Cbat × Vbat
demand by efficiently directing the required energy from the PV system,
≤ SoCmax
t battery bank, and utility grid. It also manages the charging and dis­
(3) charging of the battery bank, as well as setting the maximum SoC limit
{ for the battery bank. The general schematic of this system is shown in
(SoCmax
t − SoCt )(Nbat × Cbat × Vbat ), SoCt ≥ SoCmax
t Fig. 1.
Pbt res
(SoCt ) =
t
(SoCmin − SoCt )(Nbat × Cbat × Vbat )/ηbat , SoCt < SoCmin The mathematical model for the energy supply and demand for the
PV-battery HES can be written as following equations:
(4)
Pres bt
t = Pt
res
(SoCt (Pload − Ppv
t ))/1000 (5)
where Pt is the power supplied or discharged from the battery banks (W) t

at time step t (1- hour). The round-trip efficiency, ηbat is set as 80% for {
Pres ft res
t × C , Pt ≤ 0
charging and 100% for discharging mode. The total number of batteries Ctgrid = (6)
in the battery bank is denoted as Nbat (8 batteries), the nominal capacity Pres e res
t × C t , Pt > 0

of individual batteries is represented by Cbat (100 Ah). The nominal

voltage of the battery is denoted as Vbat (12 V), and ηsd is the self-
discharge rate of the battery (5%/720 h) [29]. The battery bank’s SoC
is constrained to a maximum SoC limit set at time step t, SoCmax
t (%), and
min
a minimum limit, SoC (20%). The combined energy storage capacity
of 800 (Ah) is used for the modeling the battery bank with DC voltage of
12 (V). When the battery bank reaches the set SoCmax
t or cannot meet the
demand for battery bank’s SoCt equals SoCmin , the residual power Pbt res
t
at given time step t can be computed using Eq. (4). A positive value for
Pbt res
indicates excess energy generation and a negative value indicates
t
the required energy needed to meet the load demand.
where Pres
t (kW) denotes the residual power of the PV-battery HES at
given time step t, which is subjected to the SoCmax
t limit set by the PEMS
grid
controller as defined in Eqs. (3) and (4). Ct (US$) represents the cost of
electricity exchanged from the grid, which is negative if the electricity is
sold to the grid at fixed feed-in-tariff Cft (US$/kWh) and positive if the
electricity is bought from the grid at the dynamic or static price of
electricity Cet (US$/kWh).
In Fig. 2, the energy flow behavior of PV-battery HES is shown based
on two days of hourly data. The simulated data consist of first day with
relatively lower PV production followed by second day of higher PV
power output, while the load pattern is kept same for both scenarios. The
minimum SoC limit on the battery is not applied. From the Fig. 3, we can
observe that during both days, the PV output during the daytime is
sufficient to satisfy the load with excess energy available for battery.

Fig. 1. Residential grid-connected PV-battery hybrid energy system with energy management system.

3
K. Shivam et al.
Fig. 2. Simulation of hourly power flow, load and battery SoC of grid-connected PV-battery hybrid energy system.
Fig. 3. The hierarchical control strategy for predictive energy management in residential grid-connected PV-battery systems.
However, during the night, the battery SoC drops to critical levels
approaching 0% and the required energy to meet the load demand needs
to be bought from the grid. It is important for maintaining the battery
health that the battery’s minimum SoC limit is constrained to a safe
level. With availability of excess energy, it is also important to develop
an efficient EMS strategy that can manage the transaction of energy with
the utility grid in order to provide both economic and environmental
benefits.
3. Energy management strategy
This section gives detail explanation of multi-objective predictive
control strategy of PV-battery system. At first the outline of the energy
management strategy is described, followed by the description of Res-
CNN architecture used for forecasting one-step ahead energy genera­
tion and load demand. Last, the problem formulation for the multi-
objective optimization is presented.
3.1. Multi-objective predictive control strategy
The erratic behavior of solar radiation and load demand makes en­
ergy management for PV systems difficult to deal with. Therefore, bat­
tery bank is used for energy storage during low energy generation
periods. However, grid-connected mode of operation reduces some
system reliability burden from the EMS tasks and other aspects like
economic and environmental impact can be addressed with higher pri­
ority. A hierarchical control strategy is introduced for predictive control
4
Energy Conversion and Management 237 (2021) 114103
of energy flow in residential grid-connected PV-battery HES as shown in
Fig. 3. The proposed strategy begins with the monitoring and prediction
of the energy generation and load demand. A logical/rule based control
is applied to the data flow to control the computational load on the
system and improve the accuracy of following prediction and control
processes. A machine learning prediction framework is deployed to
make energy generation and load forecast based on historical data
collected through monitoring and filtered by the logic-based data con­
trol. Thereafter, at second level, a multi-objective problem is formed
using the forecast which is optimized using meta-heuristic optimization
algorithm. The solution obtained from optimization is then used at
control level, for battery charge scheduling for next time step (1-hour in
this case), followed by energy trade with the utility grid for recent time
step and result of PEMS process is then recorded by the monitoring and
prediction level.
In Fig. 4, a flow chart of proposed strategy is presented. The process
begins with collection of PV system’s energy output and an electric load
at current time step. Thereafter, sliding window [20,30,31] method for
preparing model training data is applied to the collected PV energy and
electric load data. Training data is prepared as a set of 168-time steps
with maximum sets of data constrained to 21 and a sliding window of 1
time step. If the dataset exceeds the total sets 21, the oldest set in the
dataset is discarded. Prepared data is then used to train the Res-DCCN
model and other benchmark prediction methods including naïve/
persistence predictor, SVM and ANN and using the latest (21st) set of
data, PV energy and electric load demand for next time step is predicted.
Corrections are applied to predicted data by checking the sunrise to
K. Shivam et al.
Fig. 4. Flowchart of proposes multi-objective predictive energy management strategy.
sunset time (6 AM to 6PM) and if the current time step is in night period,
the PV energy output predictions are adjusted to zero value, else the
predicted values are used for further processes. Predicted values for
energy and load data are the used for multi-objective optimization for
finding optimal battery charge limit for next time step. The optimization
process continues till convergence, after which a solution is calculated
satisfy the balance between the defined objectives for optimization.
Then, the current time step’s load demand is compensated using PV
energy, battery bank or if required from utility grid as shown in ‘control’
section of Fig. 4. If excess energy is generated that surpasses the battery
bank’s scheduled maximum SoC limit, then it is sold to the utility grid.
The next time step’s energy and load data is then compared with the
predictions of forecasting model, if the prediction error of previous step
is smaller than the set threshold of error for both data, the training of the
model (except for naïve predictor) is skipped for given time step. Thus,
reducing the computational load on the PEMS controller and speeding
up the EMS process.
3.2. Prediction model
A variant of residual dilated causal convolutional network (Res-
DCCN) is used for forecasting one-step ahead energy generation and
load demand. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are an excellent
choice for time-series prediction for their inherent feature extraction
capabilities, which eliminates the need of advance pre-processing of
data. Also, unlike fully connected neural networks, CNN incorporates
features from neighboring steps, giving them an advantage for
leveraging parallel processing techniques and learning local time series
trends. Causal variation of convolutional network ensures the order of
time series convolution is always one-directional, i.e., the convolution
output of any time step uses information from previous time steps.
Dilation during convolution allows the convolutional filters of smaller
size kernels to capture larger data than its specified length. Thus, the
smaller number of filters are required and the total number of trainable
parameters can be reduced. Also skipped connections as in residual ar­
chitecture can help reduce the vanishing gradients during the model
training by allowing the flow of data from previous convolutional step to
the next one. The DCCN architecture used in this study is an one step
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Energy Conversion and Management 237 (2021) 114103
ahead forecasting variation of ‘SeriesNet’ proposed in [32]. In this study
we modify the number of filters, f to be equal to the number of hours in a
day (24 h) and kernel size, s to 3, which corresponds to the 3-hour time
step as our data is sampled at 1-hour interval. The progressive increase
in dilation at each residual block ensures that the model learns different
local trend and global trend of the time series at different convolutional
stages. For more details on residual dilated causal convolutional
network and sliding window technique, one may refer to the previous
work of authors in [20].
In this study, we use a Res-DCCN architecture as shown in Fig. 5(a).
The proposed architecture comprises 7 residual blocks with progres­
sively increasing dilation rates. The skipped connections of each residual
block are then added to extract the time series features of the energy
generation and load demand data. A dropout [33] of 10% is added to the
last two residual blocks to limit the influence of higher order dilation in
the last results. A 1 × 1 convolutional layer for one-to-one feature
mapping is applied, followed a layer of fully connected layer of 168
neurons with linear activation to transform the extracted features to
one-step ahead prediction. The loss function for the model training is
specified as mean absolute error of predicted and actual values. To train
two univariate models for PV energy generation and load demand data,
the loss function of two models are chained using summation and are
optimized together using a first-order stochastic gradient descent algo­
rithm, Adam [34]. By chaining the loss functions of two models as
shown in Fig. 5(b), parallel and simultaneous training and prediction on
two different data types can be performed using one prediction model.
The optimizer parameters are set as follows, learning rate = 0.00075,
exponential decay rate for first moment estimate = 0.9, exponential
decay rate for second moment estimate = 0.999 and epsilon value for
numerical stability = 10-7. The model is trained until reaching a training
loss of 0.001 or maximum training epoch of 50. The prediction model is
coded in ‘TensorFlow’ [35] machine learning library for ‘Python’ pro­
gramming environment.
In order to benchmark the proposed Res-DCCN model, we use three
popular prediction techniques (Naïve, SVM, ANN) that are used in en­
ergy management strategies [17,18]. Naïve/persistence technique uses
the previous time step values to make the one-step ahead forecast. We
also used SVM regression model [36] with radial basis function kernel
K. Shivam et al. Energy Conversion and Management 237 (2021) 114103

Fig. 5. (a) Proposed residual dilated causal convolutional network for PV energy generation and load demand prediction. (b) Parallel training and prediction of two
Res-DCCN models by chaining the models’ losses.

for predicting the load and PV output data. The regularization parameter energy management. Three objectives are considered in this study, net
for the SVM is set to 10 and the stopping criteria for the training loss is cost of electricity, total CO2 emission and maximum battery SoC limit.
set to 0.001. SVM implementation for this study used ‘Scikit-learn’ li­ The battery charge scheduling problem is formulated as following
brary [37]. Also, an ANN also known multi-layer perceptron (MLP) is equations:
used for comparing the prediction performance. ANN is modelled to ( )
have two hidden layers with 42 and 21 neurons each with sigmoid minf SoCmax grid e pv max
t+1 = min(Ct+1 , Ft+1 , − SoCt+1 ) (7)
activation function. A dropout rate [33] of 20% is applied for the outputs subjectto:
of first and second hidden layers in order to prevent over fitting. The
e pv
parameter search for both SVM regression model and ANN model is
e load 4
Ft+1 < Ft+1 + 10−
done using ‘Scikit-learn’ library by cross-validated grid-search over a
parameter grid using first 21 sets of time series data. Both SVM and ANN 20% ≤ SoCmax
t+1 ≤ 100% (8)
models are trained over mean squared error loss function, where ANN is where:
optimized using Adam optimizer for maximum training epoch set to 100
and stopping criteria for training loss is 0.001.
e pv
Ft+1 = (Pres
t+1 /1000) × 0.421 (9)

e load
Ft+1 = (Pload
t+1 /1000) × 0.421 (10)
3.3. Problem formulation and multi-objective optimization
As shown in Eq. (7), the objective function comprises minimization
The proposed PEMS strategy targets the residential buildings of cost of electricity exchanged from grid Cgrid t+1 (US$) as economic
equipped with PV-battery hybrid systems. Since the economic objective e pv
objective, minimization of CO2 emission of PV-battery HES, Ft+1 (kg) as
of such systems is of highest priority for the residential users. However, environmental objective and maximization of battery bank’s maximum
the environmental objective cannot be undermined, therefore, this study charge limit SoCmax
t+1 (%) as technical objective. Since the optimization is
considers the total CO2 production and offset as one of the objectives for

6
K. Shivam et al. Energy Conversion and Management 237 (2021) 114103

performed for battery bank’s charge scheduling for one step ahead, there
norm(x) = (x − xmin )/(xmax − xmin ) (11)
for the time step is denoted as t + 1, and SoCmax
t+1 is used as the input for
e pv
the optimization problem. The optimization is constrained to Ft+1 being ( grid )2
(12)
epv 2 2
fbest = min(norm Ct+1 + norm(Ft+1 ) + norm(− SoCmax
t+1 ) )
smaller than the CO2 emission of system without PV-battery system
denoted as Ft+1
e load
and SoCmax
t+1 is bounded by minimum limit of 20% and where, Eq. (11) represents the normalization operation for vector x. In
maximum limit of 100% as shown in Eq. (8). The minimum limit for the
Eq. (12), the method for find best solution, fbest is shown, which satisfies
SoC limit is bounded to 20% in order to prevent the damage to the the balance between all three objectives.
batteries due to critically low charge [29] as shown in Fig. 2. The CO2
emission constraint is applied to the optimization problem in order to
4. Results
prevent the optimization algorithm for finding solutions where, all the
residual power left after compensating the electrical load is sold to the
In this section, the simulation results of proposed multi-objective
grid. An overhead of 10-4 is added to the constraint in order to limit the
predictive control for PV-battery EMS are presented. In the beginning
complete transaction of residual energy to the utility grid. This overhead
the data used for the simulation is discussed. Thereafter, the perfor­
is especially useful when the SoC limit is at its minimum for a longer
mance of the prediction model on the dataset is presented. Finally, two
period and in order to prevent damage to the batteries due to self-
case studies, considering (a) static electricity pricing and (b) dynamic
discharging, the additional power can be used to compensate the
electricity pricing is presented to evaluate the performance of proposed
power loss in batteries. In Equation (9) and Eq. (10), the method for
methodology in these two scenarios.
calculating the CO2 emission for residential building with and without
PV-battery HES is shown. Where the constant, 0.421 is the amount (kg)
4.1. Simulation data
of CO2 produced per unit of electricity (kWh). This value is referenced
from the Taiwan Power Company for year 2019 [38].
For this study, we use ERA5 global reanalysis data [43], to get the
The differential evolution variant of multi-objective evolutionary
solar radiation and ambient temperature variables for Tainan city,
algorithm (MOEA/D-DE) [39,40] is used to solve the optimization
Taiwan for Year 2019. Using these photovoltaic variables, the PV energy
problem shown in Eqs. (7) to (10). The constrained are handled using
generation for year 2019 is calculated as shown in Fig. 6(a). To simulate
‘Kuri’s death penalty’ method as described in [41]. The MOEA/D-DE
realistic residential load conditions, the load data from “Typical Mete­
parameters are set: (a) population size = 151, (b) generations = 15,
orological Year” third edition dataset [44] for Key West, Florida, USA is
(c) neighborhood size = 25, (d) differential evolution parameter = 0.5,
used since the location shares same climatology to that of Tainan city.
(e) crossover probability = 80%, (f) distribution index = 20, neighbor­
Time series for load demand is shown in Fig. 6(b). By subtracting the
hood consideration probability = 80% and (g) diversity preservation by
hourly load from hourly PV energy generation, the excess PV energy
new population = 3/iteration. The multi-objective optimization is coded
available at hourly interval can be calculated as shown in Fig. 6(c).
using ‘Pygmo’, a ‘Python’ binding for ‘Pagmo’ optimization library [42].
The best solution for each multi-objective optimization step is chosen by
4.2. Prediction models and errors
an equal weighting method for each objective function as shown in Eq.
(11) and (12). Each of objectives are normalized between the maximum
The prediction accuracy of chained prediction model consisting two
and minimum values of the Pareto front population. By using equal
Res-DCCN model is tested on the PV energy generation and hourly load
weights, the equal consideration of economic, environmental and
demand datasets shown in previous subsection. The predictions are
technical objectives for PEMS battery charge scheduling, is ensured.
made on the two time-series datasets using sliding window training and
prediction technique as discussed in Section 3.1 for 1000 runs. Similarly,

Fig. 6. (a) Hourly PV energy generation (b) Hourly residential load, (c) Hourly excess energy production for Year 2019.

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K. Shivam et al. Energy Conversion and Management 237 (2021) 114103

the ANN model is used for predicting the load and PV output dataset and Table 1
prediction model is run for 1000 times. Since both Res-DCCN and ANN Error metrics of prediction model for load and PV energy generation dataset.
models have dropout layers and are trained using stochastic optimiza­ Dataset Metrics Naïve SVM ANN Res-DCCN
tion algorithm, Adam. It is important to test the models multiple times in (ours)
order to capture their stochastic behavior for predictions. Because of the Load R2 μ 0.8674 0.9583 0.9389 0.9725
deterministic behavior of naïve prediction and SVM regression, these dataset σ – – 0.0054 0.0009
models are only analyzed for single run. In Fig. 7, normalized absolute MAE μ 179.5597 104.6348 116.213 75.1337
error for daily prediction of each model is shown. The mean absolute σ – – 5.9149 1.2746
MAPE μ 0.1112 0.0674 0.0657 0.0476
errors are normalized using maximum value on hourly prediction and σ – – 0.003 0.0007
the average of 24 h is taken in order to convert them to one-day horizon. SMAPE μ 0.1101 0.0653 0.0671 0.0474
For the residential load dataset, as shown in Fig. 7(a), naïve forecast σ – – 0.0033 0.0008
model returns the highest error, followed by ANN and then SVM NRMSE μ 0.0699 0.0392 0.0474 0.0318
0.0021 0.0006
regression approaches. Our Res-DCNN model has lowest prediction σ – –
PV energy R2 μ 0.8596 0.9174 0.9267 0.9308
error rate on average. From the Fig. 7(a), the stochastic behavior of ANN dataset σ – – 0.0014 0.0024
and CNN can be clearly observed as they have some randomness in their MAE μ 654.6358 489.82 418.1992 417.164
prediction error, whereas, naïve and SVM regression prediction errors σ – – 13.2703 8.8312
are more deterministic for load dataset. In Fig. 7(b), for PV energy MAPE μ 5.215 4.4882 3.5514 3.4819
σ 2.1306 0.2201
generation dataset, both naïve and SVM regression models shows higher
– –
SMAPE μ 1.2957 1.2308 1.2041 1.2003
error rates and randomness, whereas, ANN and our Res-DCNN model σ – – 0.0086 0.003
models, due to their stochastic behavior are able to provide more ac­ NRMSE μ 0.0917 0.0703 0.0662 0.0589
curate predictions. This is due to the stochastic nature of the PV energy σ – – 0.0007 0.001
generation dataset which depends on several factors including solar
irradiance, ambient temperature etc. Therefore, the stochastic predic­
training provides highest prediction accuracy on both datasets among
tion models such as ours and ANN are better at learning such temporal
the prediction models used for benchmarking. As for model uncertainty,
randomness in the PV energy generation data.
the standard deviation values for our proposed model are lower than
The error metrics [17,20] for two datasets for including coefficient of
ANN model, which indicates that our model is able to capture the
determination (R2 score) [17], mean absolute error (MAE), mean ab­
temporal trends of the dataset much better than ANN. Therefore, it can
solute percentage error (MAPE), symmetric mean absolute percentage
be concluded that our proposed prediction model is not only highly
error (SMAPE), normalized root mean squared error (NRMSE) are pre­
accurate but also numerically stable with lower prediction uncertainty.
sented in Table 1. The mean (μ) and standard deviation (σ) for ANN and
our Res-DCCN model metrics are computed for 1000 training and pre­
diction simulations. For load dataset, naïve predictor shows an R2 score 4.3. Energy management case study
of 0.8674 which can be considered reasonably accurate for low precision
application. However, SVM regression shows better prediction accuracy To test the performance of proposed PEMS, two electricity pricing
on different metrics than ANN model. For stochastic dataset such as PV cases are considered in this study. Case 1 considers the electricity price
energy dataset ANN model provides much better accuracy than naïve from grid to be fixed for all around the year at 0.082 (US$/kWh),
and SVM models. But overall, our Res-DCNN model with chained loss whereas, in case 2, dynamic pricing for units of electricity used during

Fig. 7. Comparison between naïve, ANN, SVM and our Res-DCCN model for (a) Normalized daily mean absolute errors for residential load dataset, (b) Normalized
daily mean absolute errors for PV energy generation dataset.

8
K. Shivam et al.
different seasons is considered. The dynamic pricing chart [45] for case
2 is presented in Table 2. In Dynamic pricing for summer (June to
September), the prices of electricity are usually higher than other
months and the cost of electricity increases according to amount of
electricity consumed on monthly basis. For both cases the feed-in-tariff
is taken as a fixed value of 0.19 (US$/kWh) as according to rates [46] set
by Taiwan’s authorities for PV system up to 15 kW capacity valid for
next 20 years. For comparing the performance of proposed predictive
control strategy, variables of residential building with PV system
referred as ‘No-PV’ and residential building with PV system but without
EMS referred as ‘No-EMS’ is used. For reference, ‘No-EMS’ mode of
operation considers the same power flow model as EMS mode, with
difference being no battery charging scheduling. The battery charge
limits SoCmax
t and SoCmin fixed at 100% and 20% respectively.
All the computational models are programmed and simulated on
notebook personal computer with following configurations: CPU: i5
7200U, CPU cores: 2 physical cores (with hyper-threading), RAM: 8 GB
and GPU: Nvidia GeForce 920MX.
4.3.1. Case 1: static electricity pricing
For case 1, the electricity prices are set at a fixed value of 0.082 (US
$/kWh) and simulations are performed using the proposed PEMS
strategy for 100 runs on the datasets described in Section 4.1. Results of
simulations are listed in Table 3 including energy, economic, technical
and environmental variables for one-year data. Using the proposed
strategy, not only more than half the energy requirement for the resi­
dential building can be met by PV-battery system but also a higher
amount of excess energy can be sold to the utility grid than bought. As
the electricity prices are fixed in this case, we can observe a profit of
1255.03 (US$) (199.87% increase) for a one-year period. A reduction of
7515.44 (kg) or 155.69% of CO2 emissions can be observed compared to
the ‘No-PV’ configuration. Here CO2 emissions are calculated as the
difference of CO2 emission and CO2 offset. The proposed PEMS strategy
also shows an increase in profit compared to No-EMS, PEMS with naïve
prediction, the PEMS with SVM regression model and PEMS with ANN
model at 156.73%, 22.08%, 23.78% and 24.72% respectively. Also,
using our PEMS, 48.71%, 9.70%, 9.66% and 9.58% less CO2 emission
are recorded compared to No-EMS, PEMS with naïve prediction, PEMS
with SVM and PEMS with ANN, respectively. The similarity in the results
of PEMS with SVM and PEMS with ANN can be observed due to models
are unable to predict both load and PV energy data with similar accu­
racy. As shown in Table 1, SVM is has lower error on the load dataset
however, ANN was able to predict PV energy data with higher accuracy
than SVM. This difference leads to similar optimization results for these
two methods. Due to highest prediction accuracy, PEMS with our dual
Res-DCCN model was able to converge at more accurate results and
provided optimal battery charge scheduling which resulted in superior
performance. Overall PEMS with naïve predictor has lowest computa­
tion time requirement followed by SVM and ANN. Average computation
time required by proposed PEMS strategy is approximately 2.1 (sec/
step). The numerical stability of proposed strategy can be determined by
lower standard deviation of each variables as shown in Table 3. The
equation of calculating the reduction of total cost of energy and CO2
Table 2
Dynamic electricity prices for case 2.
Number of units used Electricity prices (US$/kWh)
(kWh)
Summer (June to Others (October to
September) May)
0–120 0.055 0.055
120–330 0.082 0.071
330–500 0.12 0.098
500–700 0.16 0.13
700–1000 0.19 0.16
>1000 0.22 0.171
9
Energy Conversion and Management 237 (2021) 114103
emission from the baseline model (No-PV system) is as follows:
P = 100 × (xb − x)/xb (13)
where, P is the percent reduction for the variable value, x compared to
the baseline variable value, xb .
In Fig. 8, the time series plots for our proposed PEMS with dual Res-
DCCN is shown. From the plots, it can be observed that using our PEMS
strategy the frequency of energy bought from the grid is reduced while
the battery bank is regularly used for providing the energy to the
compensate the load. The SoC of battery is kept under 50% level for most
of the time steps, which resulted in less unrequired energy storage and
an increase in energy that is sold to the utility grid (grid-debit). Also,
during the higher PV production period (see Fig. 6) more energy was
sold while keeping SoC levels higher that resulted in higher CO2 offset.
Although, during the low PV energy higher amount of energy was
bought from the grid, our PEMS was able to optimally utilize the battery
storage system in order to trade some of the excess energy to the grid.
Therefore, cost of electricity sold to the grid is constantly higher and the
amount of CO2 offset is much higher than the CO2 production.
In Fig. 9, the monthly sum of energy, economic and environmental
variables are shown. From Fig. 9(a), it can be observed that for the
months of June to August the load demand is higher than the PV system
energy generation, which results to the less energy debit and lower CO2
offset of these months. However, for the rest of the year, the energy debit
and CO2 offset values are well above the CO2 production levels, which
results in overall better performance of our proposed strategy on yearly
horizon. Although, our proposed PEMS strategy has higher energy credit
values than ‘No-EMS’ configuration but that is compensated by its su­
perior energy debit performance as shown in Fig. 9(b). Also, proposed
PEMS strategy shows superior performance than ‘No-PV’ and ‘No-EMS’
configurations for CO2 emissions by consistently having higher CO2
offset values as shown in Fig. 9(c).
4.3.2. Case 2: dynamic electricity pricing
In case 2, the dynamic electricity prices as specified in Table 4 is used
for evaluating the performance of proposed PEMS strategy. For dynamic
electricity pricing, the computational load on the PEMS strategy is
increased by a factor of 20%. However, the profit for one-year horizon is
very close to that of static pricing with a slight decrease of 75.81 (US$).
Also, the PEMS strategy sold more energy to the grid to compensate for
the economic losses. As shown in Table 4, our proposed PEMS strategy
shows better performance than ‘No-PV’, ‘No-EMS’, PEMS with naïve
predictor, PEMS with SVM and PEMS with ANN, for both economic and
environmental objectives. Numerical stability of the proposed strategy is
not affected by the dynamic pricing of electricity as the standard devi­
ation of 1000 runs are similar to the static pricing case with minor dif­
ferences. Also, from Table 3 and Table 4, it can be observed that PEMS
strategies offers significant reduction in total cost of energy and total
CO2 emission compared to No-EMS configuration, however the predic­
tion accuracy is a key factor for the finding optimal battery charge
scheduling. For both static and dynamic pricing cases the results of
PEMS with SVM and PEMS with ANN are relatively similar. Also,
significantly higher prediction accuracy on load dataset and relatively
higher accuracy on PV energy dataset gives an advantage to proposed
PEMS with dual Res-DCCN and it was able to achieve more reduction in
total cost of energy and CO2 emissions.
From Fig. 10, the response of proposed PEMS strategy for dynamic
electricity pricing differs from the static pricing case. Higher battery
bank’s SoC levels can be periodically observed in Fig. 10(b). Due to the
dynamic pricing, the higher energy rated are observed during mid-year
also the PV energy production is lower that leads to the higher amount of
energy bought from the grid (Fig. 10(c)) and lower instances of high
amount energy sold to grid can be observed in Fig. 10(d). Similarly, the
lower instances of high CO2 offset can be observed as shown in Fig. 10
(f), however, some instances of higher CO2 offsets are set by the PEMS
K. Shivam et al. Energy Conversion and Management 237 (2021) 114103

Table 3
Results of proposed PEMS strategy for 100 runs on a year data using static electricity prices.
Variables/Strategy No-PV No-EMS PEMS-Naive PEMS-SVM PEMS-ANN PEMS-Ours

μ σ μ σ
Total PV energy (kWh) 17,868.22 17,868.22 17,868.22 17,868.22 17,868.22 – 17,868.22 –
Total load (kWh) 15,325.51 15,325.51 15,325.51 15,325.51 15,325.51 – 15,325.51 –
Total energy sold (kWh) – 4,732.47 8,239.38 8,287.91 8,277.84 7.52 9,702.80 6.67
Total energy bought (kWh) 15,325.51 5,802.94 7,168.90 7,217.44 7,207.36 7.23 7,176.91 5.64
Total cost of energy (US$) 1,256.69 714.5 − 977.63 − 956.19 − 944.35 11.58 − 1,255.02 0.8
Total reduction in cost of energy (%) – 43.14 177.79 176.09 175.15 – 199.87 –
Total CO2 emission (kg) 6,452.04 − 450.67 − 2967.4 − 2969.74 − 2975.34 4.44 − 3592.89 3.15
Total CO2 reduced, P (%) – 106.98 145.99 146.03 146.11 – 155.69 –
computation time (sec/step) – – 0.32 0.81 1.75 0.031 2.1 0.54

Fig. 8. Time series plots of proposed PEMS strategy on static electricity prices (a) Energy bought from grid, (b) Battery bank’s SoC, (c) cost of electricity bought from
grid, (d) cost of electricity sold to grid, (e) CO2 produced by buying electricity, (f) CO2 offset by selling electricity to the grid.

strategy to optimize the environmental objective whenever higher
amount of PV energy generation is observed. Therefore, the total CO2
reduction still exceeds 100% as shown in Table 4.
On monthly horizon the dynamic pricing does affect the overall,
economic and environmental variables as shown in Fig. 11. It can be
observed that the energy debit or total price of electricity sold to the
utility is significantly lower during the months of June to August,
reaching a minimum during the month of August. This phenomenon can
be explained by the higher electricity prices during these months and
lower PV energy generation. However, for the rest of the year the
amount of electricity sold to the grid is slightly higher than the static
pricing mode which compensates less energy trade to the utility grid
during June to August. The CO2 emission levels follow a similar trend as
the energy debit during these three months when the energy production
is lower, however, the lower CO2 offsets are compensated by proposed
PEMS during the other months of the year when a higher amount of PV
energy is available. From the Fig. 11(a) it can be seen that our proposed
PEMS strategy actively buys more electricity from grid than No-EMS
configuration, however, from Fig. 11(b), our proposed method also
sells significantly higher amount of energy to the grid. This active
transaction of energy between grid and GCHES enables the higher
reduction in overall electricity bill. Similarly, our proposed PEMS results
in overall higher CO2 offset than No-EMS configuration as shown in
Fig. 11(c).
5. Discussion
Several studies have tried to tackle the problem of efficient energy
management of HES systems using innovative control and optimization
strategies. Among these studies we compare some of the relevant one

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K. Shivam et al. Energy Conversion and Management 237 (2021) 114103

Fig. 9. Monthly comparison plots of PEMS strategy results for static electricity pricing (a) energy variables, (b) economic variables, (c) environmental variables.

Table 4
Results of proposed PEMS strategy for 1000 runs on a year data using dynamic electricity prices.
Variables/Strategy No-PV No-EMS PEMS-Naive PEMS-SVM PEMS-ANN PEMS-Ours

μ σ μ σ
Total PV energy (kWh) 17,868.22 17,868.22 17,868.22 17,868.22 17,868.22 – 17,868.22 –
Total load (kWh) 15,325.51 15,325.51 15,325.51 15,325.51 15,325.51 – 15,325.51 –
Total energy sold (kWh) – 4,732.47 8,238.96 8,287.75 8,276.72 7.8 9,721.81 8.94
Total energy bought (kWh) 15,325.51 5,802.94 7,168.48 7,217.28 7,206.24 7.2 7,193.06 7.61
Total cost of energy (US$) 1256.69 735.7 − 899.83 − 902.71 − 902.63 0.54 − 1,179.21 0.56
Total reduction in cost of energy (%) – 41.46 171.60 171.83 171.83 – 193.83 –
Total CO2 emission (kg) 6,452.04 − 450.67 − 2964.77 − 2966.83 − 2974.74 3.61 − 3588.135 4.96
Total CO2 reduced (%) – 106.98 145.95 145.98 146.11 – 155.61 –
computation time (sec/step) – – 0.39 0.91 1.86 0.031 2.51 0.34

with our proposed method in Table 5. Chakir et al. [47] proposed an
flowchart/switching and control algorithm based energy management
approach for GCHES comprising PV and battery components. Although,
simple to implement this method rather focuses on maximum utilization
of power generated by PV array than exploiting the full potential of
GCHES, therefore control behavior is similar to standalone HES as the
objective is the maximum use of renewable source. In Zupančič et al.
[48], a tree-based control method is discussed as EMS strategy for
GCHES with PV and battery system. This method develops a decision
tree for power flow after analyzing the historical data including electric
load, electricity prices and solar irradiance for the specific location and
by performing a multi-objective optimization using non-dominated
sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) considering operational cost
and green factor (independence from the grid). Although the control
method itself is computationally simple, the optimization of decision
trees required access to large amount of historical data and a compu­
tationally expensive optimization process. Also, this method will require
the control model updates if the electricity prices and/or solar irradiance
pattern are changed. In contrast to the flowchart and tree-based control
methods where the controlled parameters are fixed, predictive control
methods update the control parameters of EMS by optimizing the EMS
objectives using predicted HES variables. Aghajani et al. [49] presented
an EMS strategy that uses ANN to predict the future values for load, wind
turbine power and PV array power. The predicted values are used for
multi-objective optimization of operational cost and CO2 emission ob­
jectives using multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO)
algorithm. In this study, it was also shown that free-flow of energy be­
tween the HES and grid can lead to higher reduction in cost and CO2
emission objectives. In Dahmane et al. [12], an predictive EMS strategy
is introduced for a standalone HES that uses artificial neuro-fuzzy
interface system (ANFIS) to predict the load and weather variables.
Thereafter the predicted variables are used to compute the power
potential and to minimize the use of non-renewable sources. Since, the
solar and wind power potentials are computed indirectly using weather
data, the model uncertainties cannot be avoided. Also, access to the local
weather data requires a sensor system to be incorporated with HES
system thus increasing the system complexity. In Mbuwir et al. [50], an
reinforcement learning (RL) agent is used to optimally maximize the use
the PV output power. Although this strategy only requires the system’s
operational data to function the optimization objective only focuses on
maximization of PV power usages thus storing the excess energy in
battery for future use. Our proposed PEMS strategy incorporates a
restricted energy flow model, where the PV output is given priority,
however, the excess energy is not constrained and can be either stored in
battery bank or sold to the grid considering the optimal balance between
cost, CO2 emission and SoC objectives. Our methodology doesn’t require
a complex sensor installation for acquiring the weather data. Also, as
shown in results section, our dual Res-DCCN model can provide higher
prediction accuracy which is essential for obtaining near-optimal per­
formance [51]. Since our prediction model uses sliding window training
method and updates model every iteration, there is no requirement for
large historical data and the model can self-adjust to the uncertainties in
power output and load pattern. Therefore, our proposed prediction
model can find high quality solution for optimization objectives and can
work out-of-box without any preprocessing or data requirement. Also,
only one control parameter, maximum SoC limit is considered to reduce
the implementation complexity. A hierarchical control method is also
introduced to control the data flow, prediction model training and
switching off the prediction model during night, which further lowers
the computational load. The computation load of our proposed meth­
odology can easily be handled by a low-price single board computer or
embedded edge computing modules, therefore doesn’t increases the
initial capital cost of HES significantly.

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K. Shivam et al. Energy Conversion and Management 237 (2021) 114103

Fig. 10. Time series plots of proposed PEMS strategy on dynamic electricity prices (a) Energy bought from grid, (b) Battery bank’s SoC, (c) cost of electricity bought
from grid, (d) cost of electricity sold to grid, (e) CO2 produced by buying electricity, (f) CO2 offset by selling electricity to the grid.

Fig. 11. Monthly plots of PEMS strategy results for dynamic electricity pricing (a) energy variables, (b) Economic variables, (c) environmental variables.

6. Conclusions framework and considers economic, environmental and technical ob­

This study proposes a multi-objective predictive control strategy for
grid-connected PV-battery systems for residential buildings. A hierar­
chical control method is introduced including logical control of data
flow for computational load and accuracy management, machine
learning framework of dual Res-DCCN model for predicting one-step
ahead energy production and load demand and a multi-objective opti­
mization for battery charge scheduling. The multi-objective optimiza­
tion problem is formed using the predictions of the machine learning
jectives for each time step. Economic objective is specified as the cost of
electricity, environmental objective considers the CO2 emission/reduc­
tion and technical objective considers the maximum limit of battery
bank’s state-of-charge. The performance of dual Res-DCCN model is
evaluated on the PV energy generation and load demand data by using a
sliding window prediction technique for 1000 runs. The proposed pre­
diction model is benchmarked against popular prediction strategies
including naïve predictor, SVM regression and ANN. Two case studies
are presented to evaluate the proposed PEMS strategy, PEMS with naïve

12
K. Shivam et al. Energy Conversion and Management 237 (2021) 114103

Table 5
Comparison of related energy management strategies.
References Energy System Configuration Historical data Control strategy Optimization objectives Energy management
requirement approach

Chakir et al. Grid, PV and battery None Real-time switching Minimizing the operational energy Flowchart and control
[47] losses algorithm
Zupančič et al. Grid, PV and battery Load, electricity prices Tree-based strategy Minimizing the operational cost and Multi-objective
[48] and irradiance maximizing the green factor optimization using NSGA-II
algorithm
Aghajani et al. Grid, micro-turbine, PV, wind Load, wind and PV ANN with flowchart Minimizing the operational cost and Multi-objective
[49] turbine, fuel cell and battery power output CO2 emission optimization using MOPSO
algorithm.
Dahmane Standalone, PV, wind turbine, Load, irradiance, ANFIS with subsystem Minimizing the use of non-renewable Non-linear constraint
et al. [12] battery and diesel generator temperature and wind controller and switching source programming
speed
Mbuwir et al. Grid, PV and battery Load, PV power output, RL agent with switching Maximizing the PV power usage Fitted Q-iteration
[50] Grid transaction
Our proposed Grid, PV and battery Load, PV output Hierarchical control with Minimizing the energy bought from Multi-objective
Dual-Res-CNN model grid, CO2 emission and maximizing optimization using MOEA/
battery SoC D-DE

predictor, PEMS with SVM and PEMS with ANN considering static and
dynamic electricity prices. The numerical stability of the proposed
strategy is tested by running simulation 1000 times. The following
conclusion for this study can be made:
Proposed dual Res-DCCN model provides superior prediction accu­
racy compared to naïve predictor, SVM regression and ANN model.
While reaching R2 scores of 0.9308 for PV energy production and
0.9275 for the load demand data, this model also shows better perfor­
mance on MAE, MAPE, SMAPE and NRMSE metrics with excellent nu­
merical stability over 1000 runs.
Proposed PEMS strategy shows superior performance compared to
‘No-PV’, ‘No-EMS’, ‘PEMS-Naïve’, ‘PEMS-SVM’ and ‘PEMS-ANN’ con­
figurations for both reducing the monthly electricity bills up to 199.87%
and overall CO2 emission up to 155.69% for the residential building,
while handling more 50% of yearly load requirement for both static and
dynamic electricity pricing mode.
The proposed multi-objective predictive control strategy also shows
excellent numerical stability and computation time on both case studies
including static and dynamic electricity pricing.
The significant reduction in total cost of energy and CO2 emission
justifies the usage of PEMS in residential buildings. PEMS strategy can
help residential users significantly decrease the energy cost without
undermining the environmental objectives. The limitations and key
observations of this study can be listed as follows:
PEMS strategies are generally better at energy management and
battery scheduling task as ‘PEMS-naïve’ strategy was able to achieve
significant performance gain over ‘No-EMS’ configuration even with
lower prediction accuracy.
Prediction accuracy of PV energy generation and load demand plays
an important role in finding optimal optimization solution. As shown in
this study both SVM and ANN prediction models ended up having
similar PEMS results because they had lower accuracy than each other in
one of the datasets. As Res-DCCN model was able to predict both data­
sets with higher accuracy, PEMS equipped with Res-DCCN had better
performance.
Limitation of Res-DCCN model and our PEMS strategy is the
computational complexity, on an average notebook computer, it takes
over 2 s to train, predict and optimize. Therefore, it may not be practical
enough for application with shorter time steps than 1 min and it may
require the improvement in computational efficiency and memory
consumption. However, for applications with 10 min or higher EMS time
interval, our proposed method is highly practical.
The future work of this study includes investigation of including
internet-of-things technology and real-time improvements for the pro­
posed algorithm. The development of a low-cost control system for the
proposed PEMS strategy is also planned for future research directions.
The researchers and engineers interested in this topic can improve upon
our research and explore the real-time implementation aspects of pro­
posed predictive control strategy for residential PV-battery systems on
shorter interval time steps.
Funding
This research received no external funding.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
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