On Using Blockchains for Safety-Critical Systems

Innovation in the world of today is mainly driven by software. Companies need to continuously rejuvenate their product portfolios with new features to stay ahead of their competitors. For example, recent trends explore the application of blockchains to domains other than finance. This paper analyzes the state-of-the-art for safety-critical systems as found in modern vehicles like self-driving cars, smart energy systems, and home automation focusing on specific challenges where key ideas behind blockchains might be applicable. Next, potential benefits unlocked by applying such ideas are presented and discussed for the respective usage scenario. Finally, a research agenda is outlined to summarize remaining challenges for successfully applying blockchains to safety-critical cyber-physical systems

Small-Scale Markets for Bilateral Resource Trading in the Sharing Economy

We consider a general small-scale market for agent-to-agent resource sharing, in which each agent could either be a server (seller) or a client (buyer) in each time period. In every time period, a server has a certain amount of resources that any client could consume, and randomly gets matched with a client. Our target is to maximize the resource utilization in such an agent-to-agent market, where the agents are strategic. During each transaction, the server gets money and the client gets resources. Hence, trade ratio maximization implies efficiency maximization of our system. We model the proposed market system through a Mean Field Game approach and prove the existence of the Mean Field Equilibrium, which can achieve an almost 100% trade ratio. Finally, we carry out a simulation study motivated by an agent-to-agent computing market, and a case study on a proposed photovoltaic market, and show the designed market benefits both individuals and the system as a whole

Developing a PV and Energy Storage Sizing Methodology for Off-Grid Transactive Microgrids

A simulation tool was developed through MATLAB for comparing Centralized Energy Sharing (CES) and Interconnected Energy Sharing (IES) operating strategies with a standard Stand-Alone Photovoltaic System (SAPV). The tool can be used to investigate the effect of several variables on cost and trading behavior including: initial charge of Energy Storage System (ESS), amount of load variability, starting month, number of stand-alone systems, geographic location, and required reliability. It was found that the CES strategy improves initial cost by 7% to 10% compared to a standard SAPV in every simulation. The IES case consistently saved money compared to the baseline, just by a very small amount (less than 1%). The number of systems did not have a demonstrable effect, giving the same cost per system whether there were 2 systems or 50 involved in the trading strategies. Geographic locations studied (Indianapolis, Indiana; Phoenix, Arizona; Little Rock, Arkansas; and Erie, Pennsylvania) showed a large variation on the total installed cost with Phoenix being the least expensive and Erie being the most expensive location. Required reliability showed a consistent and predictable effect with cost going down as the requirement relaxed and more hours of outage were allowed

Market Methods for Supply and Demand Management in the Smart Grid

This study addresses the resource management problem in a large scale networked system with high flexibility. We consider the supply and demand management problem specifically in the context of the future Smart Grid. On the supply side, we design a secondary market to provide stochastic energy service via distributed renewable energy resources. The performance of the proposed market is evaluated in two circumstances, i.e. whether or not the extra energy penetration caused by the market changes the operation point of the power grid. On the demand side, we would like to take the advantages of the residential demand flexibility to relieve consumption peaks and stabilize the system. We conduct certain demand response in a market approach and further build a real experiment system to analyze the performance of such regime. The study of supply side market is referred to the subheading: Small-Scale Markets for a Bilateral Energy Sharing Economy followed by an extension of the corresponding market which brings in the concern that the increased energy penetration may change the operation point of the grid. As for the demand side study, design and analysis of such demand response market is under the subheading: Mean Field Games in Nudge Systems for Societal Networks and the real experiment built-up is presented in Incentive-Based Demand Response: Empirical Assessment and Critical Appraisal. We model the agent behaviour in both markets via game theoretic approach and analyze the equilibrium performance. We show that a Mean Field Game regime can be applied to accurately approximate these repeated game frameworks and socially desirable equilibria that benefit both system operator and agents exist