13,243 research outputs found
Scenarios for the development of smart grids in the UK: literature review
Smart grids are expected to play a central role in any transition to a low-carbon energy future, and much research is currently underway on practically every area of smart grids. However, it is evident that even basic aspects such as theoretical and operational definitions, are yet to be agreed upon and be clearly defined. Some aspects (efficient management of supply, including intermittent supply, two-way communication between the producer and user of electricity, use of IT technology to respond to and manage demand, and ensuring safe and secure electricity distribution) are more commonly accepted than others (such as smart meters) in defining what comprises a smart grid.
It is clear that smart grid developments enjoy political and financial support both at UK and EU levels, and from the majority of related industries. The reasons for this vary and include the hope that smart grids will facilitate the achievement of carbon reduction targets, create new employment opportunities, and reduce costs relevant to energy generation (fewer power stations) and distribution (fewer losses and better stability). However, smart grid development depends on additional factors, beyond the energy industry. These relate to issues of public acceptability of relevant technologies and associated risks (e.g. data safety, privacy, cyber security), pricing, competition, and regulation; implying the involvement of a wide range of players such as the industry, regulators and consumers.
The above constitute a complex set of variables and actors, and interactions between them. In order to best explore ways of possible deployment of smart grids, the use of scenarios is most adequate, as they can incorporate several parameters and variables into a coherent storyline. Scenarios have been previously used in the context of smart grids, but have traditionally focused on factors such as economic growth or policy evolution. Important additional socio-technical aspects of smart grids emerge from the literature review in this report and therefore need to be incorporated in our scenarios. These can be grouped into four (interlinked) main categories: supply side aspects, demand side aspects, policy and regulation, and technical aspects.
Smart Grid Communications: Overview of Research Challenges, Solutions, and Standardization Activities
Optimization of energy consumption in future intelligent energy networks (or
Smart Grids) will be based on grid-integrated near-real-time communications
between various grid elements in generation, transmission, distribution and
loads. This paper discusses some of the challenges and opportunities of
communications research in the areas of smart grid and smart metering. In
particular, we focus on some of the key communications challenges for realizing
interoperable and future-proof smart grid/metering networks, smart grid
security and privacy, and how some of the existing networking technologies can
be applied to energy management. Finally, we also discuss the coordinated
standardization efforts in Europe to harmonize communications standards and
protocols.Comment: To be published in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial
A Case for Cooperative and Incentive-Based Coupling of Distributed Clusters
Research interest in Grid computing has grown significantly over the past
five years. Management of distributed resources is one of the key issues in
Grid computing. Central to management of resources is the effectiveness of
resource allocation as it determines the overall utility of the system. The
current approaches to superscheduling in a grid environment are non-coordinated
since application level schedulers or brokers make scheduling decisions
independently of the others in the system. Clearly, this can exacerbate the
load sharing and utilization problems of distributed resources due to
suboptimal schedules that are likely to occur. To overcome these limitations,
we propose a mechanism for coordinated sharing of distributed clusters based on
computational economy. The resulting environment, called
\emph{Grid-Federation}, allows the transparent use of resources from the
federation when local resources are insufficient to meet its users'
requirements. The use of computational economy methodology in coordinating
resource allocation not only facilitates the QoS based scheduling, but also
enhances utility delivered by resources.Comment: 22 pages, extended version of the conference paper published at IEEE
Cluster'05, Boston, M
InterCloud: Utility-Oriented Federation of Cloud Computing Environments for Scaling of Application Services
Cloud computing providers have setup several data centers at different
geographical locations over the Internet in order to optimally serve needs of
their customers around the world. However, existing systems do not support
mechanisms and policies for dynamically coordinating load distribution among
different Cloud-based data centers in order to determine optimal location for
hosting application services to achieve reasonable QoS levels. Further, the
Cloud computing providers are unable to predict geographic distribution of
users consuming their services, hence the load coordination must happen
automatically, and distribution of services must change in response to changes
in the load. To counter this problem, we advocate creation of federated Cloud
computing environment (InterCloud) that facilitates just-in-time,
opportunistic, and scalable provisioning of application services, consistently
achieving QoS targets under variable workload, resource and network conditions.
The overall goal is to create a computing environment that supports dynamic
expansion or contraction of capabilities (VMs, services, storage, and database)
for handling sudden variations in service demands.
This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of
InterCloud for utility-oriented federation of Cloud computing environments. The
proposed InterCloud environment supports scaling of applications across
multiple vendor clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of
rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results
demonstrate that federated Cloud computing model has immense potential as it
offers significant performance gains as regards to response time and cost
saving under dynamic workload scenarios.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, conference pape
A Taxonomy of Data Grids for Distributed Data Sharing, Management and Processing
Data Grids have been adopted as the platform for scientific communities that
need to share, access, transport, process and manage large data collections
distributed worldwide. They combine high-end computing technologies with
high-performance networking and wide-area storage management techniques. In
this paper, we discuss the key concepts behind Data Grids and compare them with
other data sharing and distribution paradigms such as content delivery
networks, peer-to-peer networks and distributed databases. We then provide
comprehensive taxonomies that cover various aspects of architecture, data
transportation, data replication and resource allocation and scheduling.
Finally, we map the proposed taxonomy to various Data Grid systems not only to
validate the taxonomy but also to identify areas for future exploration.
Through this taxonomy, we aim to categorise existing systems to better
understand their goals and their methodology. This would help evaluate their
applicability for solving similar problems. This taxonomy also provides a "gap
analysis" of this area through which researchers can potentially identify new
issues for investigation. Finally, we hope that the proposed taxonomy and
mapping also helps to provide an easy way for new practitioners to understand
this complex area of research.Comment: 46 pages, 16 figures, Technical Repor
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