Energy Management Strategies for Smart Green MicroGrid Systems: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Having neither precise definition nor a commonly accepted scope, the term “MicroGrid” tends to be used differently across researchers and practitioners alike. The management of energy usage within a microgrid is one of the topics that was handled from numerous perspectives. This study presents systematic literature review (SLR) of research on architectures and energy management techniques for microgrids, providing an aggregated up-to-date catalogue of solutions suggested by the scientific community. The SLR incorporated 45 papers selected according to inclusion/exclusion criteria and defined a priori. The selection process was based on an automated search and covered three known digital libraries. The extraction process covers three main questions. (i) The architectures of microgrids including their components, their bus configuration, and the adopted utility grid policy. (ii) The employed methods to ensure an optimal usage of energy under uncertainty. (iii) The confronted challenges and constraints of the suggested strategies. The findings of this SLR indicate a great diversity of methods and a rich background. Finally, the SLR suggests that future research should take into account the uncertainty aspect relating to energy management rather than the direct use of historical data as it is commonly done in most research papers. A sensitivity analysis should be provided in the latter case.