Peer Review History

Original SubmissionDecember 18, 2023
Decision Letter - Emanuele Crisostomi, Editor

PONE-D-23-41665Multi-objective Optimal Decision for Orderly Power Utilization Based on Improved ε-Constraint MethodPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. huang,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

In particular, different final recommendations have been received by three expert reviewers. Apart from specific minor comments, it appears that the scientific contribution of the manuscript, and its novelty with respect to the existing state of the art, remains as the main shortcoming of the manuscript. If the Authors believe that they are able to address this last concern, then they are invited to resubmit a revised version of the manuscript. Please note that the revised manuscript would be evaluated mostly in terms of its original scientific contribution.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Mar 15 2024 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

  • A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
  • A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
  • An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Emanuele Crisostomi, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at 

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and 

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf

2. Thank you for submitting the above manuscript to PLOS ONE. During our internal evaluation of the manuscript, we found significant text overlap between your submission and previous work in the [introduction, conclusion, etc.].

We would like to make you aware that copying extracts from previous publications, especially outside the methods section, word-for-word is unacceptable. In addition, the reproduction of text from published reports has implications for the copyright that may apply to the publications.

Please revise the manuscript to rephrase the duplicated text, cite your sources, and provide details as to how the current manuscript advances on previous work. Please note that further consideration is dependent on the submission of a manuscript that addresses these concerns about the overlap in text with published work.

[If the overlap is with the authors’ own works: Moreover, upon submission, authors must confirm that the manuscript, or any related manuscript, is not currently under consideration or accepted elsewhere. If related work has been submitted to PLOS ONE or elsewhere, authors must include a copy with the submitted article. Reviewers will be asked to comment on the overlap between related submissions (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-related-manuscripts).]

We will carefully review your manuscript upon resubmission and further consideration of the manuscript is dependent on the text overlap being addressed in full. Please ensure that your revision is thorough as failure to address the concerns to our satisfaction may result in your submission not being considered further.

3. Please note that PLOS ONE has specific guidelines on code sharing for submissions in which author-generated code underpins the findings in the manuscript. In these cases, all author-generated code must be made available without restrictions upon publication of the work. Please review our guidelines at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/materials-and-software-sharing#loc-sharing-code and ensure that your code is shared in a way that follows best practice and facilitates reproducibility and reuse.

4. We note that the grant information you provided in the ‘Funding Information’ and ‘Financial Disclosure’ sections do not match. 

When you resubmit, please ensure that you provide the correct grant numbers for the awards you received for your study in the ‘Funding Information’ section.

5. Thank you for stating the following financial disclosure: 

"This research received funding Science and Technology Project of China Southern Power Grid Corporation (GZHKJXM20210056 (080036KK52210003))."

Please state what role the funders took in the study.  If the funders had no role, please state: "The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript." 

If this statement is not correct you must amend it as needed. 

Please include this amended Role of Funder statement in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf.

6. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: 

"This research received funding Science and Technology Project of China Southern Power Grid Corporation (GZHKJXM20210056 (080036KK52210003))."

We note that you have provided funding information that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. However, funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form. 

Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows: 

"This research received funding Science and Technology Project of China Southern Power Grid Corporation (GZHKJXM20210056 (080036KK52210003))."

Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf.

7. In the online submission form, you indicated that [he data used to support the study are available upon request to the corresponding author.]. 

All PLOS journals now require all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript to be freely available to other researchers, either 1. In a public repository, 2. Within the manuscript itself, or 3. Uploaded as supplementary information.

This policy applies to all data except where public deposition would breach compliance with the protocol approved by your research ethics board. If your data cannot be made publicly available for ethical or legal reasons (e.g., public availability would compromise patient privacy), please explain your reasons on resubmission and your exemption request will be escalated for approval. 

8. PLOS requires an ORCID iD for the corresponding author in Editorial Manager on papers submitted after December 6th, 2016. Please ensure that you have an ORCID iD and that it is validated in Editorial Manager. To do this, go to ‘Update my Information’ (in the upper left-hand corner of the main menu), and click on the Fetch/Validate link next to the ORCID field. This will take you to the ORCID site and allow you to create a new iD or authenticate a pre-existing iD in Editorial Manager. Please see the following video for instructions on linking an ORCID iD to your Editorial Manager account: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xcclfuvtxQ

9. We note you have included a table to which you do not refer in the text of your manuscript. Please ensure that you refer to Table 3 in your text; if accepted, production will need this reference to link the reader to the Table.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: N/A

**********

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: 1. English should be improved.

2. Title: Please use the literature background to develop a better title in order to catch the prospective reader's attention.

3. Abstract: It should be rewritten in terms of aim, background, motivation, and significant results. Your abstract should clearly state the essence of the problem you are addressing, what you did, and what you found and recommended. That would help prospective readers of the abstract decide if they wish to read the entire article.

4. The main concern I have about the paper is with respect to the contributions of your work. The methodology used has few outstanding innovation points. So what innovative work have you done compared with previous studies?

5. How does your work contribute to this field? It is not clearly stated in the abstract and conclusion sections.

6. Introduction: it is not well organized. With the current introduction, it is not possible to understand the gap between the previous research and the novelty of the current works. The introduction should be fully reorganized to show the difference between the current work and the previous one.

7. What is the new devolved methodology? It is not clearly presented.

8. The provided results are limited, not convincing, and insufficient to publish in this quality journal.

9. Discussion of the results should provide useful insights. The results should be further elaborated to display how they could be utilized in real-world situations. The authors should further develop critical assessment in the results discussion.

10. Conclusions: It is poorly written and lacks an evaluation of the significant and main findings from the current work that have been found.

Reviewer #2: Authors proposed a multi-objective optimization to reduce the costs of electricity supply, including total operation costs, costs for the users, and minimization of system load fluctuations. Three demand response programs, such as peak transferring, peak shifting and peak clipping were considered. The work is interesting and relevant, however, some details should be clarified before publication.

I would suggest extending and diversifying the literature review. A part of the paper contributions is the improved ε-constraint method, as there are several methods proposed based on the original method, it could be relevant to include them in the literature review and comment the advantages/suitability to the case study of the proposed algorithm.

Definitions of peak transferring and peak shifting looked very similar to me. If I did not misunderstand something, in both cases the loads are shifted in time, but the final total consumption does not change, and it looks like peak transferring is a particular case of peak shifting. If this is the case, could these two values be introduced as one? If not, could you better clarify the difference between the two elements?

The choices of case study parameters (especially costs) should be stated and justified, for example, it is important to specify the discount rates applied to each element (peak transferring, peak shifting and peak clipping). Also, the term “charging and discharging operation cost of the energy storage plant” is not clear to me. Why operation costs of batteries depend on the charging and discharging power at the time period?

The whole text should be proofread to solve some typos. For example, confused words (“peak shifting, peak shifting, and peak clipping,…”, “staggering compensation coefficient”), unclear sentences structure (“in the feasible domain are selected. substituting…”), missing verbs in sentences. Variables in the equations and in the text must correspond (for example, utrans i,h, QLi,t). Also, location of legend in the Figure is confusing, it looks like ES, PV and WF are located at bus 33.

Reviewer #3: This paper presents an approach to the optimal orderly power utilization problem using an enhanced epsilon-constraint optimization method.

The authors should take into consideration the following issues:

- Page 2: sentence “Since power cut will seriously national production and life …” must be rephrased!

- Page 2: pay attention to repetitions: “the graded peak shifting and graded peak shifting”.

- Page 2, lines before eq. (1): again, pay attention to repetitions – “for peak shifting, peak shifting, and peak clipping”.

- Page 3 and forward: when introducing different “lambda” coefficients, you should define their meaning, including units of measurement, e.g. lambda_trans, lambda_shift, lambda_clip, lambda_RES or lambda_ES. Basically, they should represents some kind of prices, but you should clearly define them.

- Page 3 and forward: when use in text, different variables should use sub- and super-scripts, e.g. “utrans i,h” but other similar notations exist.

- Page 3: as eq. (5) suggests, C_RES,t can be positive or negative, depending on the sign of differences between forecasted and scheduled output of photovoltaic and wind farms. Please, comment on this subject!

- Page 9, Step 5 of the algorithm: you refer to “the contraction formula (30)”. Please, check if the reference to eq. (30) is correct!

- Page 11, title of subsection D: explain what do you understand by “power gap”.

**********

6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

**********

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Revision 1

The file "Response to Reviewers" has been submitted via email. Thank you!

Attachments
Attachment
Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx
Decision Letter - Emanuele Crisostomi, Editor

Multi-objective Optimal Decision for Orderly Power Utilization Based on Improved ε-Constraint Method in Active Distribution Networks

PONE-D-23-41665R1

Dear Dr. huang,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager® and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. If you have any questions relating to publication charges, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Emanuele Crisostomi, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed

**********

2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #3: N/A

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: There is no novelty in the proposed method.

The introduction is very poor.

The proposed method is unclear.

More descriptions should be added.

Reviewer #3: No more comments. The authors have positively responded to all comments, suggestions or questions raised by the reviewer.

**********

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #3: No

**********

Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Emanuele Crisostomi, Editor

PONE-D-23-41665R1

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Huang,

I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now being handed over to our production team.

At this stage, our production department will prepare your paper for publication. This includes ensuring the following:

* All references, tables, and figures are properly cited

* All relevant supporting information is included in the manuscript submission,

* There are no issues that prevent the paper from being properly typeset

If revisions are needed, the production department will contact you directly to resolve them. If no revisions are needed, you will receive an email when the publication date has been set. At this time, we do not offer pre-publication proofs to authors during production of the accepted work. Please keep in mind that we are working through a large volume of accepted articles, so please give us a few weeks to review your paper and let you know the next and final steps.

Lastly, if your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

If we can help with anything else, please email us at customercare@plos.org.

Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access.

Kind regards,

PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff

on behalf of

Professor Emanuele Crisostomi

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Open letter on the publication of peer review reports

PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process. Therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. Reviewers remain anonymous, unless they choose to reveal their names.

We encourage other journals to join us in this initiative. We hope that our action inspires the community, including researchers, research funders, and research institutions, to recognize the benefits of published peer review reports for all parts of the research system.

Learn more at ASAPbio .