Fog Assisted Personalized Dynamic Pricing for Smartgrid

Abstract

Unit electricity pricing is of vital importance in an electric grid network. It is essential to charge the customers in a fair manner. Traditional pricing models are found to be inadequate in the ability to charge customers fairly due to a lack of support for real-time communication between customers and electricity providers. With the introduction of smart devices in the electric grid domain, the real-time gathering of information is a seamless process. Such an electric network that uses smart devices is called a smart grid. In a smart grid network, electricity providers can monitor the electricity usage pattern of customers in a real-time manner, which can then be analyzed to determine the appropriate prices. To analyze the customer's history of usage and price the electricity in a real-time manner, the computation must be performed with minimal latencies. Adoption of a fog computing layer in the smart grids can aid in the attainment of this goal. In this article, we propose a novel method for the pricing of electricity. In our approach, the electric demand of a household is predicted based on their past usage patterns. Users are then clustered into different bins based on their demands, and an evolutionary algorithm is used to generate the prices for the users present in different bins in a real-time manner to ensure the maximum attainable profit to a service provider. © 2014 IEEE.