Learning-based short-time prediction of photovoltaic resources for pre-emptive excursion cancellation

There is a growing interest in using renewable energy resources (RES) such as wind, solar, geothermal and biomass in power systems. The main incentives for using renewable energy resources include the growing interest in sustainable and clean generation as well as reduced fuel cost. However, the challenge with using wind and solar resources is their indeterminacy which leads to voltage and frequency excursions. In this dissertation, first, the economic dispatch (ED) problem for a community microgrid is studied which explores a community energy market. As a result of this work, the importance of modeling and predicting renewable resources is understood. Hence, a new algorithm based on dictionary learning for prediction of solar production is introduced. In this method, a dictionary is trained to carry various behaviors of the system. Prediction is performed by reconstructing the tail of the upcoming signal using this dictionary. To improve the accuracy of prediction, a new approach based on a novel clustering-based Markov Switched Autoregressive Model is proposed that is capable of predicting short-term solar production. This method extracts autoregressive features of the training data and partitions them into multiple clusters. Later, it uses the representative feature of each cluster to predict the upcoming solar production level. Additionally, a Markov jump chain is added to improve the robustness of this scheme to noise. Lastly, a method to utilize these prediction mechanisms in a preemptive model predictive control is explored. By incorporating the expected production levels, a model predictive controller is designed to preemptively cancel the upcoming excursions --Abstract, page iv

A Survey on Reservoir Computing and its Interdisciplinary Applications Beyond Traditional Machine Learning

Reservoir computing (RC), first applied to temporal signal processing, is a recurrent neural network in which neurons are randomly connected. Once initialized, the connection strengths remain unchanged. Such a simple structure turns RC into a non-linear dynamical system that maps low-dimensional inputs into a high-dimensional space. The model's rich dynamics, linear separability, and memory capacity then enable a simple linear readout to generate adequate responses for various applications. RC spans areas far beyond machine learning, since it has been shown that the complex dynamics can be realized in various physical hardware implementations and biological devices. This yields greater flexibility and shorter computation time. Moreover, the neuronal responses triggered by the model's dynamics shed light on understanding brain mechanisms that also exploit similar dynamical processes. While the literature on RC is vast and fragmented, here we conduct a unified review of RC's recent developments from machine learning to physics, biology, and neuroscience. We first review the early RC models, and then survey the state-of-the-art models and their applications. We further introduce studies on modeling the brain's mechanisms by RC. Finally, we offer new perspectives on RC development, including reservoir design, coding frameworks unification, physical RC implementations, and interaction between RC, cognitive neuroscience and evolution.Comment: 51 pages, 19 figures, IEEE Acces

Data based identification and prediction of nonlinear and complex dynamical systems

We thank Dr. R. Yang (formerly at ASU), Dr. R.-Q. Su (formerly at ASU), and Mr. Zhesi Shen for their contributions to a number of original papers on which this Review is partly based. This work was supported by ARO under Grant No. W911NF-14-1-0504. W.-X. Wang was also supported by NSFC under Grants No. 61573064 and No. 61074116, as well as by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, Beijing Nova Programme.Peer reviewedPostprin

Master of Science

thesisA multiple-box model was designed to determine how anthropogenic, biological, and meteorological processes combine to produce diel cycles of carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations within the urban Salt Lake Valley (uSLV). The model was forced by an anthropogenic CO2 emissions inventory, observed winds, sounding-derived mixing depths, and net biological flux estimates based on temperature, solar radiation, day of year, and ecosystem type. The model was validated using hourly CO2 data from a network of sensors around the uSLV for years 2005-2009. The model accounted for 53% of the observations on an hourly basis and accounted for 90-94% of the mean diel cycle of the observations depending on the season. Salt Lake Valley suffers from prolonged temperature inversions during the winter that trap pollutants and gases at the surface. The CO2 network (co2.utah.edu) was compared with the CO2 multiple-box model to determine whether the model could capture the main drivers of CO2 variability during the Persistent Cold Air Pool Study (PCAPS). Time-height analyses were performed to facilitate investigation and explanation of CO2 variability during PCAPS intensive observation periods (IOPs). The analyzed data included atmospheric soundings, CO2 network data, quasivertical CO2 profiles collected ascending by foot or vehicle, and laser-ceiliometer data

Hybrid Advanced Optimization Methods with Evolutionary Computation Techniques in Energy Forecasting

More accurate and precise energy demand forecasts are required when energy decisions are made in a competitive environment. Particularly in the Big Data era, forecasting models are always based on a complex function combination, and energy data are always complicated. Examples include seasonality, cyclicity, fluctuation, dynamic nonlinearity, and so on. These forecasting models have resulted in an over-reliance on the use of informal judgment and higher expenses when lacking the ability to determine data characteristics and patterns. The hybridization of optimization methods and superior evolutionary algorithms can provide important improvements via good parameter determinations in the optimization process, which is of great assistance to actions taken by energy decision-makers. This book aimed to attract researchers with an interest in the research areas described above. Specifically, it sought contributions to the development of any hybrid optimization methods (e.g., quadratic programming techniques, chaotic mapping, fuzzy inference theory, quantum computing, etc.) with advanced algorithms (e.g., genetic algorithms, ant colony optimization, particle swarm optimization algorithm, etc.) that have superior capabilities over the traditional optimization approaches to overcome some embedded drawbacks, and the application of these advanced hybrid approaches to significantly improve forecasting accuracy