General Overview and Proof of Concept of a Smart Home Energy Management System Architecture

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper proposed a Smart Home Energy Management System Architecture, which is an important and valuable application in smart home system. However, there are some proplems to authors as follows:

1.  As we know, the management systems are time-critical systems in most scenarios，but the cloud computing techniques have their limitations in time-critical systems, please explain how to overcome these drawbacks.

2.  In page 11 the discriptions of components of the middleware architecture are just overall introductions, could you gave a more detail explaination, for example, which technologies are used in each component and why apply these technologies.

3. Machine learning is used in the propoded architecture, what kind of machine learning algorithms are used and why use them.

4. Please explain how to use PCA to identify the loads of disaggregation in page 15.

5. In 4.2.1 section, the dataset used to train the system is not introduced clearly, please give a more clear explaination.

The paper is valuable in applications of smart home system. But there are some points that the autors should introduce more detail. Moreover, the edge computing is popular and suitable technique in smart sysytem. But the authors didn't apply this technique. So, I suggest  the authors revise the manuscript.

Author Response

Firstly, we appreciate the comments and remarks that enhance our work. Your
insights are invaluable in improving the quality and significance of our work. We
thank the Editor for the opportunity to resubmit our work. We have addressed the raised points in the uploaded file.
We’ve done our best to respond appropriately to all comments and suggestions.  

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper introduces an innovative Home Energy Management System (HEMS) proposal. The proposed HEMS exhibits notable features, including a flexible hardware architecture capable of accommodating diverse communication protocols, open middleware with rich APIs for edge computing applications available on GitHub, and a scalable cloud infrastructure for handling substantial datasets generated by smart meters and outlets. Furthermore, user-centric services are integrated into web and mobile applications to enhance the user experience. The proposed HEMS architecture holds promise for inspiring innovation in energy management and offers a solid foundation for future research and practical implementation, making it a suitable candidate for publication in a journal. I have some minor suggestions for the authors:

1. The title of this paper could be improved to not only capture the essence of the paper's content but also better highlight the unique and significant contributions of the proposed system. Consider a title like: "Flexible Home Energy Management System: Enabling Hardware Upgrades and Edge-Computing Applications."

2. In the introduction, the authors do not clearly state the specific problem that their paper aims to address and/or the specific objective of the study. While they mention the importance of HEMS, they don't articulate the exact problem their architecture and middleware are designed to solve.

3. In table I, the author names followed by the reference number could be used to list the previous works. For example, "Han et al. [3]" instead of just "[3]." This approach ensures that readers understand that the numbers refer to the systems mentioned in the reference list. Furthermore, in this table, "Proposed System" could be stated as "Our Proposed System" in order to make this cell description clearer.

4. In the literature review, it's worth reconsidering the inclusion of references like Kushiro et al. [20] and Inoue et al. [21], as they are two decades old and may not provide the most current insights.

5. In Table I, for the proposed system under "Wireless HAN Specification," instead of mentioning "Wi-SUN HAN/ZigBee/Thread/Bluetooth/Wi-Fi," it might be clearer to state that it "supports diverse protocols."

Overall, the paper presents a promising HEMS architecture, but these minor suggestions can help improve clarity and readability."

The use of English is suitable for an academic context, and the sentences are logically structured. However, there is room for improvement by using more concise descriptions and reducing redundancy.

Author Response

Firstly, we appreciate the comments and remarks that enhance our work. Your
insights are invaluable in improving the quality and significance of our work. We
thank the Editor for the opportunity to resubmit our work. We have addressed the raised points in the uploaded file.
We’ve done our best to respond appropriately to all comments and suggestions.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The article is very interesting, relevant and current

The relevance of the ZigBee and Bluetooth network in the project is not clear. It is also unclear how to manage Wifi, Zigbee and Bluetooth networks.

It is not clear how (sensory) power, current consumed and voltage are measured.

It could be indicated how the programming language that the platform developed.

It would be important for the results presented in figures 13 to 15 to be more visible, I suggest that they be shown outside the developed platform.

 

Finally, the reference of IoT newtorks are: NB-IoT, Sigfox, LoRa, I think it will be important for write about

Author Response

Firstly, we appreciate the comments and remarks that enhance our work. Your
insights are invaluable in improving the quality and significance of our work. We
thank the Editor for the opportunity to resubmit our work. We have addressed the raised points in the uploaded file.
We’ve done our best to respond appropriately to all comments and suggestions.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors revised the manuscript based on the comments. I suggest the paper is accepted.

There are still some minor errors in the manuscript. The authors should check it to correct the errors.

Author Response

Reviewer Coments:

Comments and Suggestions for Authors
The authors revised the manuscript based on the comments. I suggest the paper is accepted.

Comments on the Quality of English Language
There are still some minor errors in the manuscript. The authors should check it to correct the errors.

 

Author's Reply:

We appreciate the recommendations and suggestions. We have reviewed the manuscript, corrected the errors, and enhance the sentences. We are confident that the paper is ready for publication.