Residential energy management systems: A comprehensive review and case study

As cities expand and populations continue to grow, electricity demand is rising rapidly. This upward trend places increasing pressure on existing energy infrastructure and underscores the urgent need for efficient and sustainable energy management strategies, particularly within the residential sector. Residential buildings are among the highest consumers of electricity and are recognized as major contributors to global carbon emissions, largely due to inefficient energy usage and inadequate load management. To address these challenges, energy management systems (EMSs) have recently emerged as a promising solution to enhance energy efficiency, lower carbon emissions, and facilitate consumer participation in grid operations. This manuscript presents a comprehensive review and classification of residential EMS technologies, structured around three key pillars: demand response (DR), home energy management systems (HEMSs), and energy flexibility. A detailed literature analysis is conducted, covering 110 published works. The review provides a thorough categorization and systematically maps the optimization and control techniques, objective functions, load and generation types, and application domains. While prior reviews often examine residential DR, HEMSs, or energy flexibility as separate themes, this manuscript introduces an integrated three-pillar framework that jointly analyzes these domains and provides a fine-grained cross-study mapping (methods–objectives–resources) across 110 studies, enabling direct comparability and revealing underexplored research gaps. Additionally, a case study is presented to evaluate the effectiveness of a DR-integrated EMS within a standard 33-bus radial distribution system, thereby linking the survey insights to a practical optimal power flow (OPF)-based DR formulation and simulation.