Lessons Learned and Next Steps in Energy Efficiency Measurement and Attribution: Energy Savings, Net to Gross, Non-Energy Benefits, and Persistence of Energy Efficiency Behavior

This white paper examines four topics addressing evaluation, measurement, and attribution of direct and indirect effects to energy efficiency and behavioral programs: Estimates of program savings (gross); Net savings derivation through free ridership / net to gross analyses; Indirect non-energy benefits / impacts (e.g., comfort, convenience, emissions, jobs); and, Persistence of savings

Every Moment Counts: Synchrophasors for Distribution Networks with Variable Resources

Chapter 34 in the textbook, "Renewable Energy Integration: Practical Management of Variability, Uncertainty and Flexibility

Decentralized fault-tolerant control of inland navigation networks: a challenge

Inland waterways are large-scale networks used principally for navigation. Even if the transport planning is an important issue, the water resource management is a crucial point. Indeed, navigation is not possible when there is too little or too much water inside the waterways. Hence, the water resource management of waterways has to be particularly efficient in a context of climate change and increase of water demand. This management has to be done by considering different time and space scales and still requires the development of new methodologies and tools in the topics of the Control and Informatics communities. This work addresses the problem of waterways management in terms of modeling, control, diagnosis and fault-tolerant control by focusing in the inland waterways of the north of France. A review of proposed tools and the ongoing research topics are provided in this paper.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

BriskStream: Scaling Data Stream Processing on Shared-Memory Multicore Architectures

We introduce BriskStream, an in-memory data stream processing system (DSPSs) specifically designed for modern shared-memory multicore architectures. BriskStream's key contribution is an execution plan optimization paradigm, namely RLAS, which takes relative-location (i.e., NUMA distance) of each pair of producer-consumer operators into consideration. We propose a branch and bound based approach with three heuristics to resolve the resulting nontrivial optimization problem. The experimental evaluations demonstrate that BriskStream yields much higher throughput and better scalability than existing DSPSs on multi-core architectures when processing different types of workloads.Comment: To appear in SIGMOD'1

CURRENT STATUS OF BENEFITS TRANSFER IN THE U.S.: A REVIEW

Benefits transfer refers to the use of existing benefit estimates in a different, but similar context as compared to the original study which generated the benefit estimates. Benefits transfer techniques include fixed value transfer, expert opinion, and value estimator models. Although benefits transfer techniques are subject to a number of conceptual and empirical limitations, these techniques are widely applied in the United States in economic assessments of public policies and projects. The application of benefits transfer in natural resource damage assessment cases is relatively untested in the United States court system.benefits transfer, conceptual background, United States applications, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

MR-BART: Multi-Rate Available Bandwidth Estimation in Real-Time

In this paper, we propose Multi-Rate Bandwidth Available in Real Time (MR-BART) to estimate the end-to-end Available Bandwidth (AB) of a network path. The proposed scheme is an extension of the Bandwidth Available in Real Time (BART) which employs multi-rate (MR) probe packet sequences with Kalman filtering. Comparing to BART, we show that the proposed method is more robust and converges faster than that of BART and achieves a more AB accurate estimation. Furthermore, we analyze the estimation error in MR-BART and obtain analytical formula and empirical expression for the AB estimation error based on the system parameters.Comment: 12 Pages (Two columns), 14 Figures, 4 Tables

Joint in-network video rate adaptation and measurement-based admission control: algorithm design and evaluation

The important new revenue opportunities that multimedia services offer to network and service providers come with important management challenges. For providers, it is important to control the video quality that is offered and perceived by the user, typically known as the quality of experience (QoE). Both admission control and scalable video coding techniques can control the QoE by blocking connections or adapting the video rate but influence each other's performance. In this article, we propose an in-network video rate adaptation mechanism that enables a provider to define a policy on how the video rate adaptation should be performed to maximize the provider's objective (e.g., a maximization of revenue or QoE). We discuss the need for a close interaction of the video rate adaptation algorithm with a measurement based admission control system, allowing to effectively orchestrate both algorithms and timely switch from video rate adaptation to the blocking of connections. We propose two different rate adaptation decision algorithms that calculate which videos need to be adapted: an optimal one in terms of the provider's policy and a heuristic based on the utility of each connection. Through an extensive performance evaluation, we show the impact of both algorithms on the rate adaptation, network utilisation and the stability of the video rate adaptation. We show that both algorithms outperform other configurations with at least 10 %. Moreover, we show that the proposed heuristic is about 500 times faster than the optimal algorithm and experiences only a performance drop of approximately 2 %, given the investigated video delivery scenario