An Exchange Mechanism to Coordinate Flexibility in Residential Energy Cooperatives

Energy cooperatives (ECs) such as residential and industrial microgrids have the potential to mitigate increasing fluctuations in renewable electricity generation, but only if their joint response is coordinated. However, the coordination and control of independently operated flexible resources (e.g., storage, demand response) imposes critical challenges arising from the heterogeneity of the resources, conflict of interests, and impact on the grid. Correspondingly, overcoming these challenges with a general and fair yet efficient exchange mechanism that coordinates these distributed resources will accommodate renewable fluctuations on a local level, thereby supporting the energy transition. In this paper, we introduce such an exchange mechanism. It incorporates a payment structure that encourages prosumers to participate in the exchange by increasing their utility above baseline alternatives. The allocation from the proposed mechanism increases the system efficiency (utilitarian social welfare) and distributes profits more fairly (measured by Nash social welfare) than individual flexibility activation. A case study analyzing the mechanism performance and resulting payments in numerical experiments over real demand and generation profiles of the Pecan Street dataset elucidates the efficacy to promote cooperation between co-located flexibilities in residential cooperatives through local exchange.Comment: Accepted in IEEE ICIT 201

Energy Contract Settlements through Automated Negotiation in Residential Cooperatives

This paper presents an automated peer-to-peer (P2P) negotiation strategy for settling energy contracts among prosumers in a Residential Energy Cooperative (REC) considering heterogeneous prosumer preferences. The heterogeneity arises from prosumers' evaluation of energy contracts through multiple societal and environmental criteria and the prosumers' private preferences over those criteria. The prosumers engage in bilateral negotiations with peers to mutually agree on periodical energy contracts/loans that consist of an energy volume to be exchanged at that period and the return time of the exchanged energy. The prosumers keep an ordered preference profile of possible energy contracts by evaluating the contracts from their own valuations on the entailed criteria, and iteratively offer the peers contracts until an agreement is formed. A prosumer embeds the valuations into a utility function that further considers uncertainties imposed by demand and generation profiles. Empirical evaluation on real demand, generation and storage profiles illustrates that the proposed negotiation based strategy is able to increase the system efficiency (measured by utilitarian social welfare) and fairness (measured by Nash social welfare) over a baseline strategy and an individual flexibility control strategy. We thus elicit system benefits from P2P flexibility exchange already with few agents and without central coordination, providing a simple yet flexible and effective paradigm that may complement existing markets.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted in IEEE SGComm 201

Robotic hand with remote control

В данной статье описывается процесс создания рабочей модели роботизированной руки сдистанционным управлением. Подобные устройства применяются во многих сферах деятельности человека, таких как автоматизированное производство, медицина, индустрия развлечений и, конечно, космонавтика. В этой статье, во-первых, подробно разъясняется процесс подбора компонентов, плюсы и минусы каждого из вариантов, во-вторых, поэтапно проиллюстрирован процесс сборки первого прототипа устройства, и в-третьих, изложен принцип работы устройства. В процессе разработки роборуки было выяснено, что управляющие алгоритмы для микроконтроллера не сложно написать самому. Однако организовать правильную работу датчиков оказалось весьма сложно. Автор предполагает, что это устройство будет одним из шагов к созданию высокоточных манипуляторов для использования в космосе.This article is described the process of creating of the working model of a robotic hand with remotecontrol. Similar devices are used in many fields of activity of society, such as automatic manufacture, medicine,entertainment industry and, of course, cosmonautics. This article firstly explained in detail the process of selectionof components, pluses and minuses of each of options, secondly, assembly process of the first prototype of the device is step by step illustrated, and thirdly, the working principle of the device is described. In the process of development of a robohand it has been found out that it isn't difficult to write the operating algorithms for the microcontroller. However to organize the correct operation of sensors it has appeared very difficult. The author assumes that this device will be ones more step to create high-precision manipulators for use in space

Automated negotiation with Gaussian process-based utility models

Designing agents that can efficiently learn and integrate user's preferences into decision making processes is a key challenge in automated negotiation. While accurate knowledge of user preferences is highly desirable, eliciting the necessary information might be rather costly, since frequent user interactions may cause inconvenience. Therefore, efficient elicitation strategies (minimizing elicitation costs) for inferring relevant information are critical. We introduce a stochastic, inverse-ranking utility model compatible with the Gaussian Process preference learning framework and integrate it into a (belief) Markov Decision Process paradigm which formalizes automated negotiation processes with incomplete information. Our utility model, which naturally maps ordinal preferences (inferred from the user) into (random) utility values (with the randomness reflecting the underlying uncertainty), provides the basic quantitative modeling ingredient for automated (agent-based) negotiation

Automated peer-to-peer negotiation for energy contract settlements in residential cooperatives

This paper presents an automated peer-to-peer negotiation strategy for settling energy contracts among prosumers in a Residential Energy Cooperative considering heterogeneity prosumer preferences. The heterogeneity arises from prosumers' evaluation of energy contracts through multiple societal and environmental criteria and the prosumers' private preferences over those criteria. The prosumers engage in bilateral negotiations with peers to mutually agree on periodical energy contracts/loans consisting of the energy volume to be exchanged at that period and the return time of the exchanged energy. The negotiating prosumers navigate through a common negotiation domain consisting of potential energy contracts and evaluate those contracts from their valuations on the entailed criteria against a utility function that is robust against generation and demand uncertainty. From the repeated interactions, a prosumer gradually learns about the compatibility of its peers in reaching energy contracts that are closer to Nash solutions. Empirical evaluation on real demand, generation and storage profiles – in multiple system scales – illustrates that the proposed negotiation based strategy can increase the system efficiency (measured by utilitarian social welfare) and fairness (measured by Nash social welfare) over a baseline strategy and an individual flexibility control strategy representing the status quo strategy. We thus elicit system benefits from peer-to-peer flexibility exchange already without any central coordination and market operator, providing a simple yet flexible and effective paradigm that complements existing markets