Smart grid for a sustainable future

Advances in micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and information communication technology (ICT) have facilitated the development of integrated electrical power systems for the future. A recent major issue is the need for a healthy and sustainable power transmission and distribution system that is smart, reliable and climate-friendly. Therefore, at the start of the 21st Century, Government, utilities and research communities are working jointly to develop an intelligent grid system, which is now known as a smart grid. Smart grid will provide highly consistent and reliable services, efficient energy management practices, smart metering integration, automation and precision decision support systems and self healing facilities. Smart grid will also bring benefits of seamless integration of renewable energy sources to the power networks. This paper focuses on the benefits and probable deployment issues of smart grid technology for a sustainable future both nationally and internationally. This paper also investigates the ongoing major research programs in Europe, America and Australia for smart grid and the associated enabling technologies. Finally, this study explores the prospects and characteristics of renewable energy sources with possible deployment integration issues to develop a clean energy smart grid technology for an intelligent power system

An Intelligent Help-Desk Framework for Effective Troubleshooting

Nowadays, technological infrastructure requires an intelligent virtual environment based on decision processes. These processes allow the coordination of individual elements and the tasks that connect them. Thus, incident resolution must be efficient and effective to achieve maximum productivity. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of an intelligent decision-support system applied in technology infrastructure at the University of Seville (Spain). We have used a Case Based Reasoning (CBR) methodology and an ontology to develop an intelligent system for supporting expert diagnosis and intelligent management of incidents. This is an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to knowledge management in problem-solving processes that are related to environmental issues. Our system provides an automatic semantic indexing for the generating of question/answer pairs, a case based reasoning technique for finding similar questions, and an integration of external information sources via ontologies. A real ontology-based question/answer platform named ExpertSOS is presented as a proof of concept. The intelligent diagnosis platform is able to identify and isolate the most likely cause of infrastructure failure in case of a faulty operation

The development of Spatial Intelligent Agents With Geographic Information Systems

The manipulation of geographic information (GI) has been considered, by most of its users, as a very complex process and has involved the development of specific applications called geographic information systems (GIS). A new subdiscipline of Information Science called Geographic Information Science (GISc) has been proposed by the GIS research community on the grounds that there are specific characteristics not only to GI but also to the processes involved in its manipulation. The thesis draws on several research issues which are part of the agenda in GISc: The complexity of handling spatial/geographic information, spatial reasoning in dynamical systems, integration of several types of application, human-computer interaction and spatio-temporal issues. In this context, this dissertation proposes the application of a new computational paradigm, intelligent agents in GISc. Intelligent agents are “computational systems that inhabit some complex dynamic environment, sense and act autonomously, and by doing so realise a set of goals or tasks for which they are designed “ (Maes, 1995). The aim of this dissertation is to analyse the potential of research in intelligent agents in GISc and to explore the use of simple learning techniques to improve the adaptability of spatial intelligent agents. The thesis involves the following objectives: to analyse the needs of research in GISc in the areas of reasoning about geographic space; to study the potential of intelligent agents in that area of research; to explore the use of simple learning techniques to improve the adaptability of intelligent agents for geographic information; and to explore the implementation environments of GIS software for the integration of intelligent agent systems. The primary contributions of this research are three case studies which use intelligent agents in a spatial or geographic context: a simple non-adaptive interface assistant for the printing and plotting tool of Smallworld GIS; an intelligent assistant that uses memory-based reasoning to identify and locate specific-purpose geographic information; a simulation of a car park where agents are cars that use reinforcement learning techniques to improve their parking performance

The next generation of interoperability agents in healthcare

Interoperability in health information systems is increasingly a requirement rather than an option. Standards and technologies, such as multi-agent systems, have proven to be powerful tools in interoperability issues. In the last few years, the authors have worked on developing the Agency for Integration, Diffusion and Archive of Medical Information (AIDA), which is an intelligent, agent-based platform to ensure interoperability in healthcare units. It is increasingly important to ensure the high availability and reliability of systems. The functions provided by the systems that treat interoperability cannot fail. This paper shows the importance of monitoring and controlling intelligent agents as a tool to anticipate problems in health information systems. The interaction between humans and agents through an interface that allows the user to create new agents easily and to monitor their activities in real time is also an important feature, as health systems evolve by adopting more features and solving new problems. A module was installed in Centro Hospitalar do Porto, increasing the functionality and the overall usability of AIDA.This work is funded by National Funds through the FCT-Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within project PEst-OE/EEI/UI0752/2014. PEst-OE means in Portuguese "Strategic Project by National Funds" and "EEI" means "Informatics and Electronic Engineering"

Development of step-compliant system for turn-mill operations

Today with the latest technology the information beyond tool movement and switching instruction such as tooling, manufacturing features and process sequences are needed to support global adaptability for manufacturing with a specific focus on CNC-based manufacture. This research focuses on the use of the new standard; ISO 14649 (STEP-NC), to address the process planning and machining of discrete turn/mill components and proposes a STEP Compliant NC structure for generation of ISO 14646 code which can be used for turning component manufacture. The novel application of this work is STEP-NC compliant process control where the research will utilise and extend the standard for in process measurement at the machine and also explore the application and integration of the STEP-NC standards. The major contribution of this research is the review of a computational environment for a STEPNC compliant system for turn/mill operations by focusing the outlines of the three major CAD/CAM frameworks to support the implementation of the standard with various levels of STEP compliant architecture. Issues related to the implementation of these frameworks and their use with STEP compliant NC controllers provide a major change in the current day use of CAD, CAPP, CAM and CNC systems. This change will bring new challenges to industrial users and software vendors to identify the new boundaries and define intelligent CNC manufacture in the 21st century

An integrated pan-European research infrastructure for validating smart grid systems

A driving force for the realization of a sustainable energy supply in Europe is the integration of distributed, renewable energy resources. Due to their dynamic and stochastic generation behaviour, utilities and network operators are confronted with a more complex operation of the underlying distribution grids. Additionally, due to the higher flexibility on the consumer side through partly controllable loads, ongoing changes of regulatory rules, technology developments, and the liberalization of energy markets, the system’s operation needs adaptation. Sophisticated design approaches together with proper operational concepts and intelligent automation provide the basis to turn the existing power system into an intelligent entity, a so-called smart grid. While reaping the benefits that come along with those intelligent behaviours, it is expected that the system-level testing will play a significantly larger role in the development of future solutions and technologies. Proper validation approaches, concepts, and corresponding tools are partly missing until now. This paper addresses these issues by discussing the progress in the integrated Pan-European research infrastructure project ERIGrid where proper validation methods and tools are currently being developed for validating smart grid systems and solutions.This work is supported by the European Community’s Horizon 2020 Program (H2020/2014-2020) under project “ERIGrid” (Grant Agreement No. 654113). Further information is available at the corresponding website www.erigrid.eu