Enabling cooperative and negotiated energy exchange in remote communities

Energy poverty at the household level is defined as the lack of access to electricity and reliance on the traditional use of biomass for cooking, and is a serious hindrance to economic and social development. It is estimated that 1.3 billion people live without access to electricity and almost 2.7 billion people rely on biomass for cooking, a majority of whom live in small communities scattered over vast areas of land (mostly in the Sub-Saharan Africa and the developing Asia). Access to electricity is a serious issue as a number of socio-economic factors, from health to education, rely heavily on electricity. Recent initiatives have sought to provide these remote communities with off-grid renewable microgeneration infrastructure such as solar panels, and electric batteries. At present, these resources (i.e., microgeneration and storage) are operated in isolation for individual home needs, which results in an inefficient and costly use of resources, especially in the case of electric batteries which are expensive and have a limited number of charging cycles. We envision that by connecting homes together in a remote community and enabling energy exchange between them, this microgeneration infrastructure can be used more efficiently. Against this background, in this thesis we investigate the methods and processes through which homes in a remote community can exchange energy. We note that remote communities lack general infrastructure such as power supply systems (e.g., the electricity grid) or communication networks (e.g., the internet), that is taken for granted in urban areas. Taking these challenges into account and using insights from knowledge domains such game theory and multi-agent systems, we present two solutions: (i) a cooperative energy exchange solution and (ii) a negotiated energy exchange solution, in order to enable energy exchange in remote communities.Our cooperative energy exchange solution enables connected homes in a remote community to form a coalition and exchange energy. We show that such coalition a results in two surpluses: (i) reduction in the overall battery usage and (ii) reduction in the energy storage losses. Each agents's contribution to the coalition is calculated by its Shapley value or, by its approximated Shapley value in case of large communities. Using real world data, we empirically evaluate our solution to show that energy exchange: (i) can reduce the need for battery charging (by close to 65%) in a community; compared with when they do not exchange energy, and (ii) can improve the efficient use of energy (by up to 10% under certain conditions) compared with no energy exchange. Our negotiated energy exchange solution enables agents to negotiate directly with each other and reach energy exchange agreements. Negotiation over energy exchange is an interdependent multi-issue type of negotiation that is regarded as very difficult and complex. We present a negotiation protocol, named Energy Exchange Protocol (EEP), which simplifies this negotiation by restricting the offers that agents can make to each other. These restrictions are engineered such that agents, negotiation under the EEP, have a strategy profile in subgame perfect Nash equilibrium. We show that our negotiation protocol is tractable, concurrent, scalable and leads to Pareto-optimal outcomes (within restricted the set of offers) in a decentralised manner. Using real world data, we empirically evaluate our protocol and show that, in this instance, a society of agents can: (i) improve the overall utilities by 14% and (ii) reduce their overall use of the batteries by 37%, compared to when they do not exchange energy

THE POTENTIAL OF MOVING PICTURES DOES PARTICIPATORY VIDEO ENABLE LEARNING FOR LOCAL INNOVATION?

N° ISBN - 978-2-7380-1284-5International audienceLearning is essential for local innovation and enhancing the ability of the rural clients to discover new solutions to prevailing challenges. Equally, the growing complexities of the challenges in the theatre of agriculture and rural development require multi-actor learning process. Participatory communication through face-to-face interaction remains an important approach to support local people's innovation capacity. Is there any mean other than face-to-face interaction that enables learning for innovations? Video has been used for several decades, however, in most cases instrumentally as a mass media for expert information dissemination. In recent years the interest in the alternative use of video, mostly known as participatory video, has grown. This study attempts to understand the potential of participatory video to support learning for local innovation by reviewing available literature about the cases of participatory video in the field of agriculture and natural resource management. A deductive coding approach was employed in order to identify the potentials of participatory video. The documented cases we found in the literature suggest that participatory video has a substantial role for both vertical and horizontal flow of local knowledge and information in a multi-actor setting. It creates a ‘safe space' for communication where different actors are able to articulate their perceptions. What follows, actors get an opportunity for reciprocal learning process. Participatory video facilitates communication for the marginalized segment of developing nations in Asia and Africa to represent their knowledge and skills and to link these to other knowledge bodies such as scientific, formal, managerial and bureaucratic. Participatory video stimulates reflection and experimentation by creating new impetus for learning within and across stakeholder (actor) groups. Nevertheless, potentials of participatory video depend on careful analysis of social competencies of facilitators, institutional ambience and role of intermediaries and facilitating organizations. We also proposed future research angles on these issues

Unraveling complex relations between forest-cover change and conflicts through spatial and relational analyses

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu MdM-2015-0552Despite the increasing prevalence of forest-cover change and conflicts, most studies have been unable to unravel the complex relations between the two processes. We attribute this failure to methodological limitations. We put forward an alternative approach that combines different datasets (remote sensing, GIS, local narratives, official censuses, newspaper articles), methods (spatial and relational analyses), and scales (subregions, economic sectors, land-based activities) to create a robust explanation of the relations between different intensities of forest-cover change and conflict in the Meseta Purépecha region, central Mexico. This is an important forest region, inhabited by indigenous and mestizo peasants; it has a worldwide reputation for community forestry and is also the epicenter of international avocado production. Forest-cover change is intense and there are recurrent episodes of conflict. We clustered communities in three subregions according to their patterns of forest-cover change. We analyzed the spatial patterns of forest-cover change and conflicts and we characterized the structure and function of the different economic sectors to unravel the nonlinear, interdependent (and sometimes contradictory) relations among these processes. We found that avocado production has differentially shaped the composition and working of society within each subregion, leading to three diverging patterns. Avocado production has provoked conflicts over landownership and over illegal logging in nearby areas. In some areas, a low incidence of conflicts over forest clearance might be explained by high profits, coercion, and violence. We suggest that, by combining spatial and relational analyses, we can integrate and check the congruence of nonequivalent representations from quantitative sources and observant participation at different scales and explain the heterogeneity that processes display across space. Our methodological approach can thus improve our understanding of similar and other complex and uncertain environmental problems elsewhere, especially when accurate or appropriate data are missing

Federated Robust Embedded Systems: Concepts and Challenges

The development within the area of embedded systems (ESs) is moving rapidly, not least due to falling costs of computation and communication equipment. It is believed that increased communication opportunities will lead to the future ESs no longer being parts of isolated products, but rather parts of larger communities or federations of ESs, within which information is exchanged for the benefit of all participants. This vision is asserted by a number of interrelated research topics, such as the internet of things, cyber-physical systems, systems of systems, and multi-agent systems. In this work, the focus is primarily on ESs, with their specific real-time and safety requirements. While the vision of interconnected ESs is quite promising, it also brings great challenges to the development of future systems in an efficient, safe, and reliable way. In this work, a pre-study has been carried out in order to gain a better understanding about common concepts and challenges that naturally arise in federations of ESs. The work was organized around a series of workshops, with contributions from both academic participants and industrial partners with a strong experience in ES development. During the workshops, a portfolio of possible ES federation scenarios was collected, and a number of application examples were discussed more thoroughly on different abstraction levels, starting from screening the nature of interactions on the federation level and proceeding down to the implementation details within each ES. These discussions led to a better understanding of what can be expected in the future federated ESs. In this report, the discussed applications are summarized, together with their characteristics, challenges, and necessary solution elements, providing a ground for the future research within the area of communicating ESs

Digital Governance as Alternative Public Service Delivery : A Case Study of Digital Public Services for Difficult Territory

application/pdf本稿は、伝統的な公共サービスの供給方法とも、またNew Public Management などが導入を推進してきたアウトソーシングや民営化、公私協働などとも異なる、Alternative Service Delivery （ASD）としてのデジタル・ガバナンスについて探求するものである。デジタル・テクノロジーが公共サービスを、特に困難な場所において供給する可能性を分析するため、日本の小笠原諸島についての事例研究を通じ、公共サービスにおける公平と公正の問題を論じる。 本稿はまず、ASD としてのデジタル・ガバナンスについて、New Public Management （NPM）、New Public Governance （NPG）、公共サービス供給、Co-production （協働） などに関する文献レビューを行ったうえ、デジタル・ガバナンスに特有のデジタル・ディバイドや透明性などの課題を指摘する。小笠原諸島に関する事例研究は、離島において様々なサービスを可能にし、また新たな機会を生み出す、公共サービス供給の一方法としてのデジタル・テクノロジーの可能性を示している。departmental bulletin pape

Decision making limitations from communication barriers in government structures in Chinese rural energy projects

Field research was conducted in the Li Cheng District (about 1,200 km 2) of Shan Dong Province. Data collection occurred during a two-week period in July 2006. At that time, seven villages represented all relevant sites in the district that contained gasification technologies. Small-group interviews with village leaders, station managers, and community members were conducted locally. Contact with external government agencies and technology scientists completed the set of potential stakeholders.;This study analyzes the failure of state-owned energy development initiatives in China. Communication barriers in bureaucratic structures and culturally prescribed patterns of interaction were revealed as inhibiting information transfer, thus restricting capabilities for individual decision making, group decision making, and learning. These presented significant challenges to maintaining successful operation of community-level gasification technologies in rural Chinese villages

A Survey on Sensor Networks from a Multiagent Perspective

Sensor networks (SNs) have arisen as one of the most promising technologies for the next decades. The recent emergence of small and inexpensive sensors based upon microelectromechanical systems ease the development and proliferation of this kind of networks in a wide range of actual-world applications. Multiagent systems (MAS) have been identified as one of the most suitable technologies to contribute to the deployment of SNs that exhibit flexibility, robustness and autonomy. The purpose of this survey is 2-fold. On the one hand, we review the most relevant contributions of agent technologies to this emerging application domain. On the other hand, we identify the challenges that researchers must address to establish MAS as the key enabling technology for SNs.This work has been funded by projects IEA(TIN2006-15662-C02-01), Agreement Technologies (CONSOLIDER CSD2007-0022, INGENIO 2010), EVE (TIN2009-14702-C02-01,TIN2009-14702-C02-02) and Generalitat de Catalunya under the gran t2009-SGR-1434. Meritxell Vinyals is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education (FPU grant AP2006-04636)Peer Reviewe