16,044 research outputs found
A Three-Step Methodology to Improve Domestic Energy Efficiency
Increasing energy prices and the greenhouse effect lead to more awareness of energy efficiency of electricity supply. During the last years, a lot of technologies have been developed to improve this efficiency. Next to large scale technologies such as windturbine parks, domestic technologies are developed. These domestic technologies can be divided in 1) Distributed Generation (DG), 2) Energy Storage and 3) Demand Side Load Management. Control algorithms optimizing a combination of these techniques can raise the energy reduction potential of the individual techniques. In this paper an overview of current research is given and a general concept is deducted. Based on this concept, a three-step optimization methodology is proposed using 1) offline local prediction, 2) offline global planning and 3) online local scheduling. The paper ends with results of simulations and field tests showing that the methodology is promising.\u
Plug-and-play and coordinated control for bus-connected AC islanded microgrids
This paper presents a distributed control architecture for voltage and
frequency stabilization in AC islanded microgrids. In the primary control
layer, each generation unit is equipped with a local controller acting on the
corresponding voltage-source converter. Following the plug-and-play design
approach previously proposed by some of the authors, whenever the
addition/removal of a distributed generation unit is required, feasibility of
the operation is automatically checked by designing local controllers through
convex optimization. The update of the voltage-control layer, when units plug
-in/-out, is therefore automatized and stability of the microgrid is always
preserved. Moreover, local control design is based only on the knowledge of
parameters of power lines and it does not require to store a global microgrid
model. In this work, we focus on bus-connected microgrid topologies and enhance
the primary plug-and-play layer with local virtual impedance loops and
secondary coordinated controllers ensuring bus voltage tracking and reactive
power sharing. In particular, the secondary control architecture is
distributed, hence mirroring the modularity of the primary control layer. We
validate primary and secondary controllers by performing experiments with
balanced, unbalanced and nonlinear loads, on a setup composed of three
bus-connected distributed generation units. Most importantly, the stability of
the microgrid after the addition/removal of distributed generation units is
assessed. Overall, the experimental results show the feasibility of the
proposed modular control design framework, where generation units can be
added/removed on the fly, thus enabling the deployment of virtual power plants
that can be resized over time
Integrated information increases with fitness in the evolution of animats
One of the hallmarks of biological organisms is their ability to integrate
disparate information sources to optimize their behavior in complex
environments. How this capability can be quantified and related to the
functional complexity of an organism remains a challenging problem, in
particular since organismal functional complexity is not well-defined. We
present here several candidate measures that quantify information and
integration, and study their dependence on fitness as an artificial agent
("animat") evolves over thousands of generations to solve a navigation task in
a simple, simulated environment. We compare the ability of these measures to
predict high fitness with more conventional information-theoretic processing
measures. As the animat adapts by increasing its "fit" to the world,
information integration and processing increase commensurately along the
evolutionary line of descent. We suggest that the correlation of fitness with
information integration and with processing measures implies that high fitness
requires both information processing as well as integration, but that
information integration may be a better measure when the task requires memory.
A correlation of measures of information integration (but also information
processing) and fitness strongly suggests that these measures reflect the
functional complexity of the animat, and that such measures can be used to
quantify functional complexity even in the absence of fitness data.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figures, one supplementary figure. Three supplementary
video files available on request. Version commensurate with published text in
PLoS Comput. Bio
Consciosusness in Cognitive Architectures. A Principled Analysis of RCS, Soar and ACT-R
This report analyses the aplicability of the principles of consciousness developed in the ASys project to three of the most relevant cognitive architectures. This is done in relation to their aplicability to build integrated control systems and studying their support for general mechanisms of real-time consciousness.\ud
To analyse these architectures the ASys Framework is employed. This is a conceptual framework based on an extension for cognitive autonomous systems of the General Systems Theory (GST).\ud
A general qualitative evaluation criteria for cognitive architectures is established based upon: a) requirements for a cognitive architecture, b) the theoretical framework based on the GST and c) core design principles for integrated cognitive conscious control systems
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