Energy Management in Smart Buildings and Homes: Current Approaches, a Hypothetical Solution, and Open Issues and Challenges

Energy plays a pivotal role for economic development of a country. A reliable energy source is needed to improve the living standards of people. To achieve such a goal, governments and industries are trying to install a new energy infrastructure called the “Smart Grid”. This helps to manage the electricity generation and distribution in an efficient manner. Buildings and other structures are the biggest consumers of electricity. There is a need to reduce the energy consumption so that the resources can be utilized efficiently. Therefore, in this paper, we give a comprehensive state-of-the-art on various recent techniques and solutions which provide energy savings in smart homes and buildings. This includes statistical models, cloud computing based solutions, fog computing and smart metering based architectures, and several other IoT (internet of things) inspired solutions. We also present a hypothetical model that treats energy supply and usage in buildings as a self-managing energy system (SES). This paper is concluded by highlighting several open issues and challenges related to energy management in buildings.