Advanced Control for Energy Management of Grid-Connected Hybrid Power Systems in the Sugar Cane Industry

This work presents a process supervision and advanced control structure, based on Model Predictive Control (MPC) coupled with disturbance estimation techniques and a finite-state machine decision system, responsible for setting energy productions set-points. This control scheme is applied to energy generation optimization in a sugar cane power plant, with non-dispatchable renewable sources, such as photovoltaic and wind power generation, as well as dispatchable sources, as biomass. The energy plant is bound to produce steam in different pressures, cold water and, imperiously, has to produce and maintain an amount of electric power throughout each month, defined by contract rules with a local distribution network operator (DNO). The proposed predictive control structure uses feedforward compensation of estimated future disturbances, obtained by the Double Exponential Smoothing (DES) method. The control algorithm has the task of performing the management of which energy system to use, maximize the use of the renewable energy sources, manage the use of energy storage units and optimize energy generation due to contract rules, while aiming to maximize economic profits. Through simulation, the proposed system is compared to a MPC structure, with standard techniques, and shows improved behavior.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad CNPq401126/2014-5Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad CNPq303702/2011-7Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad DPI2016-78338-

Virtual Communication Stack: Towards Building Integrated Simulator of Mobile Ad Hoc Network-based Infrastructure for Disaster Response Scenarios

Responses to disastrous events are a challenging problem, because of possible damages on communication infrastructures. For instance, after a natural disaster, infrastructures might be entirely destroyed. Different network paradigms were proposed in the literature in order to deploy adhoc network, and allow dealing with the lack of communications. However, all these solutions focus only on the performance of the network itself, without taking into account the specificities and heterogeneity of the components which use it. This comes from the difficulty to integrate models with different levels of abstraction. Consequently, verification and validation of adhoc protocols cannot guarantee that the different systems will work as expected in operational conditions. However, the DEVS theory provides some mechanisms to allow integration of models with different natures. This paper proposes an integrated simulation architecture based on DEVS which improves the accuracy of ad hoc infrastructure simulators in the case of disaster response scenarios.Comment: Preprint. Unpublishe

A bibliography on formal methods for system specification, design and validation

Literature on the specification, design, verification, testing, and evaluation of avionics systems was surveyed, providing 655 citations. Journal papers, conference papers, and technical reports are included. Manual and computer-based methods were employed. Keywords used in the online search are listed

The evolution of representation in simple cognitive networks

Representations are internal models of the environment that can provide guidance to a behaving agent, even in the absence of sensory information. It is not clear how representations are developed and whether or not they are necessary or even essential for intelligent behavior. We argue here that the ability to represent relevant features of the environment is the expected consequence of an adaptive process, give a formal definition of representation based on information theory, and quantify it with a measure R. To measure how R changes over time, we evolve two types of networks---an artificial neural network and a network of hidden Markov gates---to solve a categorization task using a genetic algorithm. We find that the capacity to represent increases during evolutionary adaptation, and that agents form representations of their environment during their lifetime. This ability allows the agents to act on sensorial inputs in the context of their acquired representations and enables complex and context-dependent behavior. We examine which concepts (features of the environment) our networks are representing, how the representations are logically encoded in the networks, and how they form as an agent behaves to solve a task. We conclude that R should be able to quantify the representations within any cognitive system, and should be predictive of an agent's long-term adaptive success.Comment: 36 pages, 10 figures, one Tabl