Consensus-based approach to peer-to-peer electricity markets with product differentiation

With the sustained deployment of distributed generation capacities and the more proactive role of consumers, power systems and their operation are drifting away from a conventional top-down hierarchical structure. Electricity market structures, however, have not yet embraced that evolution. Respecting the high-dimensional, distributed and dynamic nature of modern power systems would translate to designing peer-to-peer markets or, at least, to using such an underlying decentralized structure to enable a bottom-up approach to future electricity markets. A peer-to-peer market structure based on a Multi-Bilateral Economic Dispatch (MBED) formulation is introduced, allowing for multi-bilateral trading with product differentiation, for instance based on consumer preferences. A Relaxed Consensus+Innovation (RCI) approach is described to solve the MBED in fully decentralized manner. A set of realistic case studies and their analysis allow us showing that such peer-to-peer market structures can effectively yield market outcomes that are different from centralized market structures and optimal in terms of respecting consumers preferences while maximizing social welfare. Additionally, the RCI solving approach allows for a fully decentralized market clearing which converges with a negligible optimality gap, with a limited amount of information being shared.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Power System

THE ROLE OF SIMULATION IN SUPPORTING LONGER-TERM LEARNING AND MENTORING WITH TECHNOLOGY

Mentoring is an important part of professional development and longer-term learning. The nature of longer-term mentoring contexts means that designing, developing, and testing adaptive learning sys-tems for use in this kind of context would be very costly as it would require substantial amounts of fi-nancial, human, and time resources. Simulation is a cheaper and quicker approach for evaluating the impact of various design and development decisions. Within the Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) research community, however, surprisingly little attention has been paid to how to design, de-velop, and use simulations in longer-term learning contexts. The central challenge is that adaptive learning system designers and educational practitioners have limited guidance on what steps to consider when designing simulations for supporting longer-term mentoring system design and development deci-sions. My research work takes as a starting point VanLehn et al.’s [1] introduction to applications of simulated students and Erickson et al.’s [2] suggested approach to creating simulated learning envi-ronments. My dissertation presents four research directions using a real-world longer-term mentoring context, a doctoral program, for illustrative purposes. The first direction outlines a framework for guid-ing system designers as to what factors to consider when building pedagogical simulations, fundamen-tally to answer the question: how can a system designer capture a representation of a target learning context in a pedagogical simulation model? To illustrate the feasibility of this framework, this disserta-tion describes how to build, the SimDoc model, a pedagogical model of a longer-term mentoring learn-ing environment – a doctoral program. The second direction builds on the first, and considers the issue of model fidelity, essentially to answer the question: how can a system designer determine a simulation model’s fidelity to the desired granularity level? This dissertation shows how data from a target learning environment, the research literature, and common sense are combined to achieve SimDoc’s medium fidelity model. The third research direction explores calibration and validation issues to answer the question: how many simulation runs does it take for a practitioner to have confidence in the simulation model’s output? This dissertation describes the steps taken to calibrate and validate the SimDoc model, so its output statistically matches data from the target doctoral program, the one at the university of Saskatchewan. The fourth direction is to demonstrate the applicability of the resulting pedagogical model. This dissertation presents two experiments using SimDoc to illustrate how to explore pedagogi-cal questions concerning personalization strategies and to determine the effectiveness of different men-toring strategies in a target learning context. Overall, this dissertation shows that simulation is an important tool in the AIED system design-ers’ toolkit as AIED moves towards designing, building, and evaluating AIED systems meant to support learners in longer-term learning and mentoring contexts. Simulation allows a system designer to exper-iment with various design and implementation decisions in a cost-effective and timely manner before committing to these decisions in the real world

Society-in-the-Loop: Programming the Algorithmic Social Contract

Recent rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning have raised many questions about the regulatory and governance mechanisms for autonomous machines. Many commentators, scholars, and policy-makers now call for ensuring that algorithms governing our lives are transparent, fair, and accountable. Here, I propose a conceptual framework for the regulation of AI and algorithmic systems. I argue that we need tools to program, debug and maintain an algorithmic social contract, a pact between various human stakeholders, mediated by machines. To achieve this, we can adapt the concept of human-in-the-loop (HITL) from the fields of modeling and simulation, and interactive machine learning. In particular, I propose an agenda I call society-in-the-loop (SITL), which combines the HITL control paradigm with mechanisms for negotiating the values of various stakeholders affected by AI systems, and monitoring compliance with the agreement. In short, `SITL = HITL + Social Contract.'Comment: (in press), Ethics of Information Technology, 201

Systems practice in engineering: reflections on doctoral level systems supervision

The Industrial Doctorate Centre (IDC) in Systems, a collaboration between the University of Bristol and the University of Bath, offers an Engineering Doctorate (EngD) in Systems Programme which is aimed at high-calibre engineers from graduate level to early/mid-career stage with the purpose of developing the systems-thinking capabilities of future leaders in industry. Research Engineers on this programme are based ~75% of their time in industry and focussed on a research project defined by their sponsoring company. This paper presents a personal reflection on the role of the systems supervisor on this programme with a focus on four areas of particular interest to the author i) alignment of industry needs and academic research, ii) developing an appreciation for the need for systems thinking, iii) navigating the systems literature, and iv) teaching research methods for doctoral research in systems. The purpose is to encourage and engage in debate on the development of systems practice in engineering

Can Accountability be Instilled, in the Absence of an Authority Figure, in a Way Which Enhances a Human-Automation System?

abstract: As automation becomes more prevalent in society, the frequency that systems involve interactive human-automation control increases. Previous studies have shown accountability to be a valuable way of eliciting human engagement and reducing various biases, but these studies have involved the presence of an authority figure during the research. The current research sought to explore the effect of accountability in the absence of an authority figure. To do this, 40 participants took part in this study by playing a microworld simulation. Half were told they would be interviewed after the simulation, and half were told data was not being collected. Eleven dependent variables were collected (accountability, number of resources shared, player score, agent score, combined score, and the six measures of the NASA- Task Load Index), of which statistical significance was found in number of resources shared, player score, and agent score. While not conclusive, the results suggest that accountability affects human-automation interactions even in the absence of an authority figure. It is suggested that future research seek to find a reliable way to measure accountability and examine how long accountability effects last.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Human Systems Engineering 201

Research and Applications of the Processes of Performance Appraisal: A Bibliography of Recent Literature, 1981-1989

[Excerpt] There have been several recent reviews of different subtopics within the general performance appraisal literature. The reader of these reviews will find, however, that the accompanying citations may be of limited utility for one or more reasons. For example, the reference sections of these reviews are usually composed of citations which support a specific theory or practical approach to the evaluation of human performance. Consequently, the citation lists for these reviews are, as they must be, highly selective and do not include works that may have only a peripheral relationship to a given reviewer\u27s target concerns. Another problem is that the citations are out of date. That is, review articles frequently contain many citations that are fifteen or more years old. The generation of new studies and knowledge in this field occurs very rapidly. This creates a need for additional reference information solely devoted to identifying the wealth of new research, ideas, and writing that is changing the field

Cross border banking supervision : incentive conflicts in supervisory information sharing between home and host supervisors

The global financial crisis has uncovered a number of weaknesses in the supervision and regulation of cross border banks. One such weakness was the lack of effective cooperation among banking supervisors. Since then, international bodies, such as the G-20, the Financial Stability Board and the Basel Committee have actively promoted the use of supervisory colleges. The objective of this paper is to explore the obstacles to effective cross border supervisory information sharing. More specifically, a schematic presentation illustrating the misalignments in incentives for information sharing between home and host supervisors under the current supervisory task-sharing anchored in the Basel Concordat is developed. This paper finds that in the absence of an ex ante agreed upon resolution and burden-sharing mechanism and deteriorating health of the bank, incentive conflicts escalate and supervisory cooperation breaks down. The promotion of good practices for cooperation in supervisory colleges is thus not sufficient to address the existing incentive conflicts. What is needed is a rigorous analysis and review of the supervisory task-sharing framework, so that the right incentives are secured during all stages of the supervisory process. For this purpose, it is essential that policy makers integrate and harmonize the current debates on crisis management, resolution policy and good supervisory practices for cross border banking supervision.Banks&Banking Reform,Emerging Markets,Labor Policies,Financial Intermediation,Debt Markets

Discrete Event Simulations

Considered by many authors as a technique for modelling stochastic, dynamic and discretely evolving systems, this technique has gained widespread acceptance among the practitioners who want to represent and improve complex systems. Since DES is a technique applied in incredibly different areas, this book reflects many different points of view about DES, thus, all authors describe how it is understood and applied within their context of work, providing an extensive understanding of what DES is. It can be said that the name of the book itself reflects the plurality that these points of view represent. The book embraces a number of topics covering theory, methods and applications to a wide range of sectors and problem areas that have been categorised into five groups. As well as the previously explained variety of points of view concerning DES, there is one additional thing to remark about this book: its richness when talking about actual data or actual data based analysis. When most academic areas are lacking application cases, roughly the half part of the chapters included in this book deal with actual problems or at least are based on actual data. Thus, the editor firmly believes that this book will be interesting for both beginners and practitioners in the area of DES

Ecological Interface Design for Flexible Manufacturing Systems: An Empirical Assessment of Direct Perception and Direct Manipulation in the Interface

Four interfaces were developed to factorially apply two principles of ecological interface design (EID; direct perception and direct manipulation) to a flexible manufacturing system (FMS). The theoretical foundation and concepts employed during their development, with findings related to more significant issues regarding interface design for complex socio-technical systems, are discussed. Key aspects of cognitive systems engineering (CSE) and EID are also discussed. An FMS synthetic task environment was developed, and an experiment was conducted to evaluate real-time decision support during supervisory operations. Participants used all four interfaces to supervise and maintain daily part production at systematically varied levels of difficulty across sessions. Significant results provide evidence that the incorporation of direct perception and direct manipulation in interface design produced an additive effect, allowing for greater support for the supervisory agents