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Active distribution networks face growing renewable curtailment as distributed photovoltaic and wind generation increasingly encounter voltage, congestion, and flexibility constraints. Battery storage scheduling under uncertainty has become a central operational strategy for absorbing otherwise curtailed energy and improving distribution-level renewable integration. Despite substantial growth in optimization-based storage studies, the literature remains fragmented across stochastic programming, chance-constrained optimization, robust optimization, and distributionally robust formulations. No critical review has systematically compared these paradigms for storage scheduling and curtailment reduction specifically in active distribution networks. This critical review assesses and contrasts stochastic and robust optimization models for battery storage scheduling aimed at reducing renewable curtailment in active distribution networks. It evaluates how these approaches represent uncertainty, network constraints, operational objectives, and implementation readiness. A structured critical review of 27 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2017 and 2024 was conducted. The analysis focuses on mathematical formulations, uncertainty modeling, storage representation, curtailment objectives, network constraints, and operational applicability. Stochastic models offer strong expected-performance reasoning but often depend on scenario quality and can become computationally demanding. Robust models provide stronger protection against adverse uncertainty realizations but may become conservative when uncertainty sets are poorly calibrated, while gaps remain in real-time scheduling, multi-service operation, degradation modeling, and field validation. The choice between stochastic and robust optimization depends on operator risk preference, data availability, computational resources, and distribution network complexity. Hybrid, data-driven, and implementation-oriented methods offer promising future pathways for reducing renewable curtailment through battery storage scheduling.

Smart-grid optimization increasingly integrates digital twins, reinforcement learning, and cyber-physical resilience analytics into a shared research space. This convergence reflects a shift from isolated grid-control studies toward data-intensive, adaptive, and resilience-oriented infrastructure analytics. This bibliometric review maps the research landscape at the intersection of these three domains. It quantifies publication trends, identifies thematic clusters, and interprets emerging fronts in smart-grid optimization research. A structured bibliometric protocol was applied to 28 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2017 and 2025. Co-word analysis, citation analysis, thematic clustering, and citation burst interpretation were used to organize the evidence base. The analysis reveals rising publication activity after 2019 and three dominant thematic clusters. Digital twin research centers on simulation and cyber-physical representation, reinforcement learning emphasizes adaptive grid control, and cyber-resilience analytics focuses on vulnerability, disruption, and recovery. The field is moving toward integrated frameworks that combine digital twins and reinforcement learning for proactive, cyber-resilient grid optimization. These fronts suggest a growing need for real-time, explainable, and safety-aware analytics.

Smart-meter data is sensitive, and its centralization raises privacy concerns. Federated learning and privacy-preserving techniques promise to enable analytics without compromising user confidentiality. The practical viability of these methods in real-world smart-grid applications remains uncertain. A critical synthesis of their limitations, privacy assumptions, and deployment gaps is still needed. This review critically evaluates the state-of-the-art in federated and privacy-preserving learning for smart-meter analytics, grid-edge control, and DER coordination. It focuses on both methodological promise and deployment realism. A critical review of 27 peer-reviewed articles from 2017 to 2025 is conducted. The assessment focuses on technical performance, privacy guarantees, scalability, security, and deployment readiness. The review identifies key strengths in theoretical privacy and decentralized learning. It also finds substantial limitations in communication efficiency, non-IID robustness, adversarial resilience, and energy-sector-specific feasibility. Federated and privacy-preserving learning holds great promise, but critical technical and regulatory barriers must be overcome. The review provides a roadmap for future interdisciplinary research.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly used for real-time decision support and control in cyber-physical smart grids. However, the growing reliance on data-driven control creates a need for methods that are both explainable to human operators and consistent with electrical-network physics. This review proposes a two-dimensional classification scheme for AI methods in smart-grid control. The scheme combines an explainability dimension with a physics-informed dimension and applies the resulting framework to voltage regulation, congestion management, and microgrid control. A systematic literature search identified 25 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2017 and 2025. The selected studies were classified according to their explainability mechanism, degree of physical-knowledge integration, application domain, and relevance to cyber-physical grid operation. The review shows that most studies emphasize either explainability or physical consistency, while methods combining both remain limited. Voltage regulation is dominated by reinforcement-learning and safety-constrained control studies, whereas microgrid control contains a broader variety of AI methods. The proposed classification provides a structured basis for analysing trustworthy AI in smart-grid control. It highlights methodological gaps and identifies under-developed combinations of explainability, physics-informed learning, and operational deployment.

Reinforcement learning can autonomously dispatch demand response actions under changing prices, loads, and grid constraints. However, operator acceptance requires explanations that clarify why specific customers or aggregations are selected. This article presents an explainable reinforcement learning framework for demand response dispatch using customer flexibility profiles, decomposed rewards, and operator review. The objective is to preserve dispatch performance while improving transparency and controllability. The framework combines a profile-aware RL dispatcher, a decomposed reward model, an explanation generator, and a structured operator review protocol. Evaluation is performed through simulation on realistic demand response scenarios with household and flexible-load representations. The proposed explainable RL framework is designed to achieve dispatch performance comparable to black-box RL while providing interpretable action rationales. Operator review is incorporated to approve, reject, or modify dispatch recommendations before execution. The framework bridges autonomous RL control and trustworthy grid-edge operation. It provides an algorithmic blueprint for human-centered demand response dispatch.

Generative AI, including generative adversarial networks, diffusion models, variational approaches, and large language models, is increasingly being explored for smart-grid operation. Its appeal lies in its ability to create synthetic data, expand scenario sets, and support human operators facing complex and uncertain grid conditions. This review critically examines the state of generative AI in four key smart-grid applications: synthetic load profiles, contingency simulation, human-in-the-loop dispatch, and associated governance risks. It evaluates not only technical capability but also reliability, accountability, privacy, and operational readiness. A critical review of 28 peer-reviewed articles published between 2017 and 2026 is conducted. The selected literature is synthesized across methodological contributions, application domains, evaluation practices, and governance concerns. Generative AI shows promise in creating realistic load data and expanding contingency sets, but reliability, interpretability, and governance frameworks remain underdeveloped. Human-in-the-loop dispatch integration is still nascent, and most studies remain closer to proof-of-concept than operational deployment. While generative AI can enhance grid flexibility, simulation richness, and planning capability, its current maturity is uneven. Substantial research is needed to address technical, ethical, and regulatory challenges before these systems can be responsibly embedded in smart-grid operation.