User’s perspective in smart meter research: State-of-the-art and future trends

Abstract

Over the past decade, there has been extensive research on smart meters’ rollouts worldwide. Many studies have explored smart meters from the perspective of residential users. However, there is a lack of a bibliographic analysis synthesizing the knowledge into an intellectual framework. This work aimed to comprehensively analyze the available literature, covering 1555 articles. A bibliographic analysis was carried out using bibliographic coupling, co-citation, and co-word analysis, thus providing a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analysis. The result is an intellectual framework of this literature, outlining the studied themes (smart energy meter feedback, smart meter and the impact of renewable sources, smart meter’s contribution to water and energy management, effect of the smart meter on consumption reduction, and consumer in the context of smart grids) and twenty different approaches used by researchers. Past findings and future research trends of each theme are also discussed.