Nowadays, power production, reliability, quality, efficiency and penetration of renewable energy sources are amongst the most important topics in the power systems analysis. The need to obtain optimal power management and economical dispatch are expressed at the same time. The interest in extracting an optimum performance minimizing market clearing price (MCP) for the consumers and provide better utilization of renewable energy sources has been increasing in recent years. Due to necessity of providing energy balance while having the fluctuations in the load demand and non-dispatchable nature of renewable sources, implementing an energy management system (EMS) is of great importance in Microgrids (MG). The appearance of new technologies such as energy storage (ES) has caused increase in the effort to present new and modified optimization methods for power management. Precise prediction of renewable energy sources power generation can only be provided with small anticipation. Hence, for increasing the efficiency of the presented optimization algorithm in large-dimension problems, new methods should be proposed, especially for short-term scheduling. Powerful optimization methods are needed to be applied in such a way to achieve maximum efficiency, enhance the economic dispatch as well as provide the best performance for these systems. Thus, real-time energy management within MG is an important factor for the operators to guarantee optimal and safe operation of the system. The proposed EMS should be able to schedule the MG generation with minimum information shares sent by generation units. To achieve this ability, the present thesis proposes an operational architecture for real time operation (RTO) of a MG operating in both islanding and grid-connected modes. The presented architecture is flexible and could be used for different configurations of MGs in different scenarios. A general formula is also presented to estimate optimum operation strategy, cost optimization plan and the reduction of the consumed electricity combined with applying demand response (DR). The proposed problem is formulated as an optimization problem with nonlinear constraints to minimize the cost related to generation sources and responsive load as well as reducing MCP. Several optimization methods including mixed linear programming, pivot source, imperialist competition, artificial bee colony, particle swarm, ant colony, and gravitational search algorithms are utilized to achieve the specified objectives. The main goal of the thesis is to validate experimentally the design of the real-time energy management system for MGs in both operating modes which is suitable for different size and types of generation resources and storage devices with plug-and-play structure. As a result, this system is capable of adapting itself to changes in the generation and storage assets in real-time, and delivering optimal operation commands to the assets quickly, using a local energy market (LEM) structure based on single side or double side auction. The study is aimed to figure the optimum operation of micro-sources out as well as to decrease the electricity production cost by hourly day-ahead and real time scheduling. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed methods for optimal operation with minimum cost and plug-and-play capability in a MG. Moreover, these algorithms are feasible from computational viewpoints while having many advantages such as reducing the peak consumption, optimal operation and scheduling the generation unit as well as minimizing the electricity generation cost. Furthermore, capabilities such as the system development, reliability and flexibility are also considered in the proposed algorithms. The plug and play capability in real time applications is investigated by using different scenarios.