A cloud-based open automated demand response protocol with AMI support

With the increasing number of clients and emerging of renewable energies to the smart grids, maintaining a balance between supply and demand has become a challenge. One of the most important issues in smart grids is the efficient management of demand for energy transfer and distribution networks, especially in electrical grids. The recent studies mostly try to model the clients' usage patterns to use less electricity preferably, particularly during high usage hours. Nowadays demand response is one of the hottest topics in industry and academia as the demand response programs is one of the main solutions in lowering the peak demand and balancing the supply and demand. On the other hand, increasing in the number of clients in demand response programs highlights the importance of process automation of these programs. In recent years OpenADR has been introduced as the international standard for implementation response programs automation. In this paper, we implemented OpenADR in a lab environment, and the demand response server has been deployed in the private cloud. This implementation supports the ability to register clients with all the electrical device information and also automatic reading for each device and the data related to the smart meter. The goal was to combine the advanced metering infrastructures with demand response programs to reduce deployment costs and integration of services. We send useful information like clients cost, minimum and maximum usage and the average usage in the society to the clients through OpenADR to make motivations for them to reform their usage pattern.