6,982 research outputs found
From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design
As the recent financial crisis showed, today there is a strong need to gain
"ecological perspective" of all relevant interactions in
socio-economic-techno-environmental systems. For this, we suggested to set-up a
network of Centers for integrative systems design, which shall be able to run
all potentially relevant scenarios, identify causality chains, explore feedback
and cascading effects for a number of model variants, and determine the
reliability of their implications (given the validity of the underlying
models). They will be able to detect possible negative side effect of policy
decisions, before they occur. The Centers belonging to this network of
Integrative Systems Design Centers would be focused on a particular field, but
they would be part of an attempt to eventually cover all relevant areas of
society and economy and integrate them within a "Living Earth Simulator". The
results of all research activities of such Centers would be turned into
informative input for political Decision Arenas. For example, Crisis
Observatories (for financial instabilities, shortages of resources,
environmental change, conflict, spreading of diseases, etc.) would be connected
with such Decision Arenas for the purpose of visualization, in order to make
complex interdependencies understandable to scientists, decision-makers, and
the general public.Comment: 34 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c
A Review on Energy Consumption Optimization Techniques in IoT Based Smart Building Environments
In recent years, due to the unnecessary wastage of electrical energy in
residential buildings, the requirement of energy optimization and user comfort
has gained vital importance. In the literature, various techniques have been
proposed addressing the energy optimization problem. The goal of each technique
was to maintain a balance between user comfort and energy requirements such
that the user can achieve the desired comfort level with the minimum amount of
energy consumption. Researchers have addressed the issue with the help of
different optimization algorithms and variations in the parameters to reduce
energy consumption. To the best of our knowledge, this problem is not solved
yet due to its challenging nature. The gap in the literature is due to the
advancements in the technology and drawbacks of the optimization algorithms and
the introduction of different new optimization algorithms. Further, many newly
proposed optimization algorithms which have produced better accuracy on the
benchmark instances but have not been applied yet for the optimization of
energy consumption in smart homes. In this paper, we have carried out a
detailed literature review of the techniques used for the optimization of
energy consumption and scheduling in smart homes. The detailed discussion has
been carried out on different factors contributing towards thermal comfort,
visual comfort, and air quality comfort. We have also reviewed the fog and edge
computing techniques used in smart homes
Forecasting Recharging Demand to Integrate Electric Vehicle Fleets in Smart Grids
Electric vehicle fleets and smart grids are two growing technologies. These technologies
provided new possibilities to reduce pollution and increase energy efficiency.
In this sense, electric vehicles are used as mobile loads in the power grid. A distributed
charging prioritization methodology is proposed in this paper. The solution is based
on the concept of virtual power plants and the usage of evolutionary computation
algorithms. Additionally, the comparison of several evolutionary algorithms, genetic
algorithm, genetic algorithm with evolution control, particle swarm optimization, and
hybrid solution are shown in order to evaluate the proposed architecture. The proposed
solution is presented to prevent the overload of the power grid
A gap analysis of Internet-of-Things platforms
We are experiencing an abundance of Internet-of-Things (IoT) middleware
solutions that provide connectivity for sensors and actuators to the Internet.
To gain a widespread adoption, these middleware solutions, referred to as
platforms, have to meet the expectations of different players in the IoT
ecosystem, including device providers, application developers, and end-users,
among others. In this article, we evaluate a representative sample of these
platforms, both proprietary and open-source, on the basis of their ability to
meet the expectations of different IoT users. The evaluation is thus more
focused on how ready and usable these platforms are for IoT ecosystem players,
rather than on the peculiarities of the underlying technological layers. The
evaluation is carried out as a gap analysis of the current IoT landscape with
respect to (i) the support for heterogeneous sensing and actuating
technologies, (ii) the data ownership and its implications for security and
privacy, (iii) data processing and data sharing capabilities, (iv) the support
offered to application developers, (v) the completeness of an IoT ecosystem,
and (vi) the availability of dedicated IoT marketplaces. The gap analysis aims
to highlight the deficiencies of today's solutions to improve their integration
to tomorrow's ecosystems. In order to strengthen the finding of our analysis,
we conducted a survey among the partners of the Finnish IoT program, counting
over 350 experts, to evaluate the most critical issues for the development of
future IoT platforms. Based on the results of our analysis and our survey, we
conclude this article with a list of recommendations for extending these IoT
platforms in order to fill in the gaps.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, Accepted for publication in Computer
Communications, special issue on the Internet of Things: Research challenges
and solution
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