10,662 research outputs found
Optimized consumer-centric demand response
Demand side management has focused more on centralized control and heavily depends on continuous consumer interaction, often overlooking consumer thermal and visual comfort. Distribution grid management will necessitate the active involvement of new market actors (i.e. prosumers, aggregators, distribution system operators, retailers, etc.), so a holistic approach becomes critical to transform demand into an active element of electricity system management. This paper presents a consumer centric demand flexibility framework, which facilitates the automated, human-centric demand response, minimizes consumer interactions and accommodates various power system ancillary services
Business process management tools as a measure of customer-centric maturity
In application of business process management (BPM) tools in European commercial sectors, this paper examines current maturity of customer centricity construct (CC) as an emerging dimension of competition and as a potential strategic management direction for the future of business. Processes are one of the key components of transformation in the CC roadmap. Particular departments are more customer orientated than others, and processes, customer-centric expertise, and approach can be built and utilized starting from them. Positive items within a current business process that only involve minor modification could be the basis for that. The evidence of movement on the customer-centric roadmap is found. BPM in European telecommunications, banking, utility and retail sector supports roadmap towards customer-centricity in process view, process alignment and process optimization. However, the movement is partial and not flawless, as BPM hasn’t been inquired for supporting many of customer-centric dimensions
Cloud Index Tracking: Enabling Predictable Costs in Cloud Spot Markets
Cloud spot markets rent VMs for a variable price that is typically much lower
than the price of on-demand VMs, which makes them attractive for a wide range
of large-scale applications. However, applications that run on spot VMs suffer
from cost uncertainty, since spot prices fluctuate, in part, based on supply,
demand, or both. The difficulty in predicting spot prices affects users and
applications: the former cannot effectively plan their IT expenditures, while
the latter cannot infer the availability and performance of spot VMs, which are
a function of their variable price. To address the problem, we use properties
of cloud infrastructure and workloads to show that prices become more stable
and predictable as they are aggregated together. We leverage this observation
to define an aggregate index price for spot VMs that serves as a reference for
what users should expect to pay. We show that, even when the spot prices for
individual VMs are volatile, the index price remains stable and predictable. We
then introduce cloud index tracking: a migration policy that tracks the index
price to ensure applications running on spot VMs incur a predictable cost by
migrating to a new spot VM if the current VM's price significantly deviates
from the index price.Comment: ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing 201
Smart Microgrids: Overview and Outlook
The idea of changing our energy system from a hierarchical design into a set
of nearly independent microgrids becomes feasible with the availability of
small renewable energy generators. The smart microgrid concept comes with
several challenges in research and engineering targeting load balancing,
pricing, consumer integration and home automation. In this paper we first
provide an overview on these challenges and present approaches that target the
problems identified. While there exist promising algorithms for the particular
field, we see a missing integration which specifically targets smart
microgrids. Therefore, we propose an architecture that integrates the presented
approaches and defines interfaces between the identified components such as
generators, storage, smart and \dq{dumb} devices.Comment: presented at the GI Informatik 2012, Braunschweig Germany, Smart Grid
Worksho
To NACK or not to NACK? Negative Acknowledgments in Information-Centric Networking
Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is an internetworking paradigm that
offers an alternative to the current IP\nobreakdash-based Internet
architecture. ICN's most distinguishing feature is its emphasis on information
(content) instead of communication endpoints. One important open issue in ICN
is whether negative acknowledgments (NACKs) at the network layer are useful for
notifying downstream nodes about forwarding failures, or requests for incorrect
or non-existent information. In benign settings, NACKs are beneficial for ICN
architectures, such as CCNx and NDN, since they flush state in routers and
notify consumers. In terms of security, NACKs seem useful as they can help
mitigating so-called Interest Flooding attacks. However, as we show in this
paper, network-layer NACKs also have some unpleasant security implications. We
consider several types of NACKs and discuss their security design requirements
and implications. We also demonstrate that providing secure NACKs triggers the
threat of producer-bound flooding attacks. Although we discuss some potential
countermeasures to these attacks, the main conclusion of this paper is that
network-layer NACKs are best avoided, at least for security reasons.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure
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