Dear Dr. Zhang,

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.

Please submit your revised manuscript by May 15 2025 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.

• 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'.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Muhammad Zakarya, 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. Please provide a complete Data Availability Statement in the submission form, ensuring you include all necessary access information or a reason for why you are unable to make your data freely accessible. If your research concerns only data provided within your submission, please write "All data are in the manuscript and/or supporting information files" as your Data Availability Statement.

3. 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.

Additional Editor Comments:

The introduction section needs considerable effort (concise and brief). The problem being investigated should be described clearly, but before that, the field of research should be made clearer. Furthermore, briefly describe the major contributions in bullet form, just before the organization paragraph.

The introduction should lead the way throughout the paper. In addition, the benefits coming from this paper should be made clearer in the introduction and throughout the paper.

I suggest summarizing the related works into a table with respect to their characteristics. The authors should put their proposal into this table for easy comparison.

This will make it clearer to readers, and they will be able to see what was missing in the literature and how this is addressed in this paper.

Proofread the article to ensure appropriate use of English grammar, tenses, and punctuation. Longer sentences should be broken out into smaller ones. There are also some linguistic issues that should be corrected. The use of article "the" is redundant and somewhere missing.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

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

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

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

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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

The PLOS Data policy

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: 1- The manuscript contains several typographical as well as grammatical errors. Authors are suggested to get the manuscript proofread by a native English speaker.

2- The abstract only state the experimental or calculated process of this work. The authors should be given specific result to demonstrate the research significance.

3- The introduction can be improved by providing a more critical discussion of recent related literature. Discuss the shortcomings of previous work and the gaps, and how this work intends to fill those gaps. The authors should determine the novelty of the current research in the last paragraph of the introduction part.

4- Ensure all figures are presented in high resolution with clarity.

5- The authors haven't stated the limitations of their study.

6- Report the statistical analysis in a dedicated section and the significance of results.

7- All the findings of the current work need to be compared and discussed with the results of other researchers finding instead of having a general comparison with other researchers' works. The authors should perform a comparison between the forecasting results. In your discussion section, please link your empirical results with a broader and deeper literature review.

8- # Conclusions: This section is too general, please add some information about the value of obtained parameters of tested the series as well as information about the novelty of the proposed technology.

Reviewer #2: This paper proposes a cloud-edge-end-based economical management of virtual power plant source-network-load-storage in the context of electricity-carbon market. The manuscript presents some significant results worthy of publication but should be revised to be more precise and accurate in the wording of the text.

1. Add some of the most important quantitative results to the abstract. Focus on the advantages of the proposed method with respect to the obtained results.

2. Most of the ideas written were already described in many literatures. The Authors tried to compile it but lack of the enhancement of the interrelation analysis between the references. It is advised that the authors give a deeper analysis on how these ideas become more applicative strategies so that they can contribute to the next step of implementation.

3. The literature review could be greatly improved. The authors first need to make comparisons of the references and then draw the motivation of the paper. Neither the comparison of references and this work nor the corresponding conclusion is made in the paper. Thus, it is difficult for me to know the novelty and advantages of this paper over other works. To improve this part, the following relevant recent publications can be discussed: Optimal scheduling of virtual power plants with reversible solid oxide cells in the electricity market; An Innovative Cloud-Fog-Based Smart Grid Scheme for Efficient Resource Utilization; A novel fuzzy cloud stochastic framework for energy management of renewable microgrids based on maximum deployment of electric vehicles.

4. The relevant discussion and content of the figures and tables in the text are not enough.

5. There are several up-to-date approaches for the idea. Authors should look for these approaches, compare the results and prove their idea.

6. Author must justify the choice of solution method. How do authors guarantee optimality of the obtained solutions?

7. What is the main driver of optimizing cost? Electricity price? Please add figure with electricity price data.

8. The authors must explain how their approach can handle the uncertainties.

9. What's the sensitivity of the model with the change of computational parameters?.

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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

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[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.

Dear Dr. Zhang,

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.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Aug 07 2025 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.

• 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 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,

Muhammad Zakarya, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

Additional Editor Comments:

1) The introduction section still needs improvements.

Add more details about the problem being invsetigated in the introduction section.

Descuss how this research adreeses the problem (research methodology).

Remove the literature review (Sec. 1.2) and put it in a separate section.

Merge Sec. 1.1. and 1.3. Moreover add the final paragraph that describes the whole organization and flow of the paper at the end.

2) Proofread the article to ensure appropriate use of English grammar, tenses, and punctuation. Longer sentences should be broken out into smaller ones. There are also some linguistic issues that should be corrected. The use of article "the" is redundant and somewhere missing.

3) The notation table can be put in Sec 2 (problem formulation)

4) Improve the organization of the paper.

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

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: N/A

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

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

The PLOS Data policy

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: After reviewing the revised manuscript, I believe the authors have adequately addressed my comments and made improvements to the content. I have no further suggestions for revision.

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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

**********

[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

Economical Management of Virtual Power Plant Source-network-load-storage in the Context of Electricity-Carbon Market

PONE-D-25-05045R2

Dear Dr. Zhang,

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. For questions related to billing, please contact billing support .

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,

Baogui Xin, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

Reviewer #4: All comments have been addressed

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

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

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

The PLOS Data policy

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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Reviewer #2: After a thorough review of the revised version, the authors have effectively addressed the previously raised issues and made improvements in the logical structure and language expression. I find that the paper has met the publication standards and therefore recommend accepting the paper.

Reviewer #3: The paper addresses the challenges of managing Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) that integrate distributed energy resources (wind, solar, storage, EVs, and flexible loads) under the dual-carbon policy. To improve both economic and operational efficiency, the authors propose a cloud–edge–end multi-timescale management framework that coordinates the source–network–load–storage system. The paper is well-written, methodologically sound, and makes a meaningful contribution to VPP management research.

Reviewer #4: This paper proposes a multi-time-scale economic dispatch framework for Virtual Power Plant (VPP) source-network-load-storage in the electricity-carbon market context, utilizing a cloud-edge-end collaborative architecture and a two-layer optimization mechanism. The model is well-structured and supported by sufficient simulation validation, demonstrating theoretical innovation and practical value. The authors have responded thoroughly to the reviewers' comments, with significant improvements in language quality and logical structure. No academic ethics or publication compliance issues were identified. Recommended for acceptance.

**********

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 #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

Reviewer #4: No

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