Over the last 30 years leading thinkers have taken us beyond mechanistic and reductionist analysis into systems theory and the critical boundary judgements that are fundamental to systems analysis. In defining and dis...
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Over the last 30 years leading thinkers have taken us beyond mechanistic and reductionist analysis into systems theory and the critical boundary judgements that are fundamental to systems analysis. In defining and discussing boundary conditions, we also redefine values and facts imposed on hydrological and economic analysis that underpins decisions about government policy in water resources. The repeal of legislation for distributed interventions (water-efficient appliances and rainwater harvesting) that was previously enacted to improve the security of a regional water supply system is examined as a case study. The results of the analysis were defined by the costs and benefits that are inside or outside of the boundaries of legitimate and recognized consideration. This paper refers to those differences as boundary conditions and considers how those boundary conditions affect the outcome of analysis. Setting of boundary conditions (what is included, what is excluded and assumptions) in engineering and economic analysis dominates outcomes of decisions about government policy. These insights have general application to development of government water policy. The investigations outlined in this paper were combined to create an enhanced version of a systems analysis of a policy for setting targets for water savings on all new dwellings. It was established, using appropriate boundary conditions, that a 40% target for water savings is feasible for South East Queensland (SEQ) and provides a cost-benefit ratio of 2.1. These results indicate that a policy of mandating targets for sustainable buildings would provide substantial benefits to the state of Queensland, water utilities and citizens.
Technological innovations are creating a larger role for demand-side resources in electric grids. The rise of demand-side resources is occurring alongside the efforts to decarbonize grids. The confluence of these two ...
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Technological innovations are creating a larger role for demand-side resources in electric grids. The rise of demand-side resources is occurring alongside the efforts to decarbonize grids. The confluence of these two trends has motivated research on the role of demand-side resources in grid decarbonization. Here, we synthesize the demand-side resource literature to develop a coherent and realistic vision for that role. We find that demand-side resources can supplement supply-side approaches to decarbonize grids more quickly and cost effectively. The role of demand-side resources is secondary to that of supply-side resources, and a critical analysis of tradeoffs is required whenever demand-side solutions substitute for supply-side solutions. Nonetheless, our review suggests that demand-side solutions can play a meaningful role, providing around 10%-30% of the resources required for deep decarbonization in domains such as energy, peak capacity, and deployed solar capacity. However, demand-side resources remain underutilized due to several solvable barriers. The urgency imposed by climate change requires that these barriers be addressed to fully realize the demand- side resource opportunity.
To make full use of the integrated energy resources of users and make users conveniently participate in the integrated energy market, an agent mechanism design is proposed in this paper. In the mechanism, the integrat...
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To make full use of the integrated energy resources of users and make users conveniently participate in the integrated energy market, an agent mechanism design is proposed in this paper. In the mechanism, the integrated energy retailer acts as an aggregator, the users' integrated energy is agented by the aggregator and users are motivated to share their integrated energy among themselves. Through the integrated energy sharing, lower cost of the alliance composed of aggregator and users can be realized. To achieve fair benefit allocation, a novel index termed as contribution rate is first proposed to evaluate users' contributions to the integrated energy sharing. Then, asymmetric Nash bargaining theory is adopted to design a fair benefit allocation mechanism. Each user gets the corresponding benefits from the aggregator according to their contribution rates. Considering protecting users' privacy, a distributed solution with good convergence performance and suitable for many users is proposed based on the alternating direction method of multipliers decomposition technique. It can be seen from the 5-user case that through sharing users' integrated energy (sic)355.6 benefits are created. The contribution rates of user 1 to 5 range from 0.1009 to 0.244. Besides, the benefits received by user 1 to 5 are proportional to their contribution rates. All simulation results presented in this paper demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed agent mechanism design. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Background Information for Action! is a Joint Action (JA-InfAct) on Health Information promoted by the EU Member States and funded by the European Commission within the Third EU Health Programme (2014-2020) to create ...
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Background Information for Action! is a Joint Action (JA-InfAct) on Health Information promoted by the EU Member States and funded by the European Commission within the Third EU Health Programme (2014-2020) to create and develop solid sustainable infrastructure on EU health information. The main objective of this the JA-InfAct is to build an EU health information system infrastructure and strengthen its core elements by a) establishing a sustainable research infrastructure to support population health and health system performance assessment, b) enhancing the European health information and knowledge bases, as well as health information research capacities to reduce health information inequalities, and c) supporting health information interoperability and innovative health information tools and data sources. Methods Following a federated analysis approach, JA-InfAct developed an ad hoc federated infrastructure based on distributing a well-defined process-mining analysis methodology to be deployed at each participating partners' systems to reproduce the analysis and pool the aggregated results from the analyses. To overcome the legal interoperability issues on international data sharing, data linkage and management, partners (EU regions) participating in the case studies worked coordinately to query their real-world healthcare data sources complying with a common data model, executed the process-mining analysis pipeline on their premises, and shared the results enabling international comparison and the identification of best practices on stroke care. Results The ad hoc federated infrastructure was designed and built upon open source technologies, providing partners with the capacity to exploit their data and generate dashboards exploring the stroke care pathways. These dashboards can be shared among the participating partners or to a coordination hub without legal issues, enabling the comparative evaluation of the caregiving activities for acute stroke across regions
The rapidly developing computing and communication technologies improve the autonomy of individual vehicles on the one hand and facilitate the coordination among vehicles on the other. In the context of dynamic speed ...
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The rapidly developing computing and communication technologies improve the autonomy of individual vehicles on the one hand and facilitate the coordination among vehicles on the other. In the context of dynamic speed management, this study considers a platoon of intelligent vehicles that are required to maintain desired inter-vehicle spaces and to respond to speed changes in a collision-free, stable and cooperative way. The platoon is modelled as a cascaded network with linear longitudinal vehicle dynamics, independent physical constraints, and coupling safety constraints. In the case of global information sharing, the authors first propose a centralised collision-free solution on the basis of model predictive control that guarantees asymptotic platoon tracking of speed changes and satisfaction of system constraints during the transient process. A cooperative distributed approach is then further proposed on the basis of the alternating direction method of multipliers resulting in a scheme involving communication only with the roadside infrastructure, e.g. the speed manager. Vehicles in a platoon conduct parallel computation while still achieving global optimal performance and coordination with respect to the collision avoidance constraints. Convergence properties of the distributed solutions are established for the concerned vehicle platoon problem. Simulation results show satisfactory platoon performance and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.
Centralized urban water management currently faces multiple challenges, both at the supply side and the demand side. These challenges underpin the need to progress to the decentralization of urban water, where multipl...
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Centralized urban water management currently faces multiple challenges, both at the supply side and the demand side. These challenges underpin the need to progress to the decentralization of urban water, where multiple distributed technologies (water-aware appliances, rainwater harvesting, greywater recycling, sustainable urban drainage) are applied in an integrated fashion and as a supplement to centralized systems to design more resilient neighborhoods. However, the methods and tools to assess the performance of these distributed solutions and provide management support for integrated projects are still few and mostly untested in real, combined cases. This study presents a simulation-based framework for the quantitative performance assessment of decentralized systems at a neighborhood scale, where different technologies can be linked together to provide beneficial effects across multiple urban water cycle domains. This framework links an urban water cycle model, which provides a scenario-based simulation testbed for the response of the whole system, with key performance indicators that evaluate the performance of integrated decentralized solutions at a neighborhood scale. The demonstrated framework is applied to provide an ex ante evaluation of SUPERLOCAL, a newly developed area in Limburg, the Netherlands, designed as a circular, water-wise neighborhood where multiple decentralized technologies are combined.
This work addresses the problem of solving distributed optimization problems over directed graphs. Using techniques from geometric control theory, a novel methodology is proposed to design continuous-time distributed ...
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Over the past decades, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have been a core networking technology to provide drivers and passengers with safety and convenience. As a new emerging technology, the vehicular cloud computi...
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Over the past decades, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have been a core networking technology to provide drivers and passengers with safety and convenience. As a new emerging technology, the vehicular cloud computing (VCC) can provide cloud services for various data-intensive applications in VANETs, such as multimedia streaming. However, the vehicle mobility and intermittent connectivity present challenges to the large-scale data dissemination with underlying computing and networking architecture. In this paper, we will explore the service scheduling of virtual RSUs for diverse request demands in the dynamic traffic flow in vehicular cloud environment. Specifically, we formulate the RSU allocation problem as maximum service capacity with multiple-source and multiple-destination, and propose a bidirectional RSU allocation strategy. In addition, we formulate the content replication in distributed RSUs as the minimum replication set coverage problem in a two-layer mapping model, and analyze the solutions in different scenarios. Numerical results further prove the superiority of our proposed solution, as well as the scalability to various traffic condition variations.
In this paper we address the problem of fault resilient estimation for large-scale systems, where the measurements are possibly corrupted due to faults of low-cost sensors. As a toy application, we consider the proble...
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In this paper, radio resource allocation in a heterogeneous wireless access medium is studied. Mobile terminals (MTs) are assumed to have multi-homing capabilities. Both constant bit rate and variable bit rate service...
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In this paper, radio resource allocation in a heterogeneous wireless access medium is studied. Mobile terminals (MTs) are assumed to have multi-homing capabilities. Both constant bit rate and variable bit rate services are considered. A novel algorithm is developed for the resource allocation. Unlike existing solutions in literature, the proposed algorithm is distributed in nature, such that each network base station / access point can perform its own resource allocation to support the MTs according to their service classes. The coordination among different available wireless access networks' base stations is established via the MT multiple radio interfaces in order to provide the required bandwidth to each MT. A priority mechanism is employed, so that each network gives a higher priority on its resources to its own subscribers as compared to other users. Numerical results demonstrate the validity of the proposed algorithm.
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