Big IoT data mining for real-time energy disaggregation in buildings (extended abstract)

In the smart grid context, the identification and prediction of building energy flexibility is a challenging open question. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach to address this problem. It combines sparse smart meters with deep learning methods, e.g. Factored Four-Way Conditional Restricted Boltzmann Machines (FFW-CRBMs), to accurately predict and identify the energy flexibility of buildings unequipped with smart meters, starting from their aggregated energy values. The proposed approach was validated on a real database, namely the Reference Energy Disaggregation Dataset

Hu-bot:promoting the cooperation between humans and mobile robots

peer reviewedThis paper investigates human–robot collaboration in a novel setup: a human helps a mobile robot that can move and navigate freely in an environment. Specifically, the human helps by remotely taking over control during the learning of a task. The task is to find and collect several items in a walled arena, and Reinforcement Learning is used to seek a suitable controller. If the human observes undesired robot behavior, they can directly issue commands for the wheels through a game joystick. Experiments in a simulator showed that human assistance improved robot behavior efficacy by 30% and efficiency by 12%. The best policies were also tested in real life, using physical robots. Hardware experiments showed no significant difference concerning the simulations, providing empirical validation of our approach in practice

Automatic Noise Filtering with Dynamic Sparse Training in Deep Reinforcement Learning

Tomorrow's robots will need to distinguish useful information from noise when performing different tasks. A household robot for instance may continuously receive a plethora of information about the home, but needs to focus on just a small subset to successfully execute its current chore. Filtering distracting inputs that contain irrelevant data has received little attention in the reinforcement learning literature. To start resolving this, we formulate a problem setting in reinforcement learning called the $\textit{extremely noisy environment}$ (ENE), where up to $99\%$ of the input features are pure noise. Agents need to detect which features provide task-relevant information about the state of the environment. Consequently, we propose a new method termed $\textit{Automatic Noise Filtering}$ (ANF), which uses the principles of dynamic sparse training in synergy with various deep reinforcement learning algorithms. The sparse input layer learns to focus its connectivity on task-relevant features, such that ANF-SAC and ANF-TD3 outperform standard SAC and TD3 by a large margin, while using up to $95\%$ fewer weights. Furthermore, we devise a transfer learning setting for ENEs, by permuting all features of the environment after 1M timesteps to simulate the fact that other information sources can become relevant as the world evolves. Again, ANF surpasses the baselines in final performance and sample complexity. Our code is available at https://github.com/bramgrooten/automatic-noise-filterin

Deep learning methods for on-line flexibility prediction and optimal resource allocation in smart buildings

Unprecedented high volume of data is available with the upward growth of the advanced metering infrastructure. Because the built environment is the largest user of electricity, a deeper look at building energy consumption holds promise for helping to achieve overall optimization of the energy system. Yet, a knowledge transfer from the fusion of extensive data is under development. To overcome this limitation, in the big data era, more and more machine learning methods appear to be suitable to automatically extract, predict and optimized building electrical patterns by performing successive transformation of the data. More recently, there has been a revival of interest in deep learning methods as the most advance on-line solutions for large-scale and real databases. Enabling real-time applications from the high level of aggregation in the smart grid will put end-users in position to change their consumption patterns, offering useful benefits for the system as a whole.<br/

Deep learning methods for on-line flexibility prediction and optimal resource allocation in smart buildings

Unprecedented high volume of data is available with the upward growth of the advanced metering infrastructure. Because the built environment is the largest user of electricity, a deeper look at building energy consumption holds promise for helping to achieve overall optimization of the energy system. Yet, a knowledge transfer from the fusion of extensive data is under development. To overcome this limitation, in the big data era, more and more machine learning methods appear to be suitable to automatically extract, predict and optimized building electrical patterns by performing successive transformation of the data. More recently, there has been a revival of interest in deep learning methods as the most advance on-line solutions for large-scale and real databases. Enabling real-time applications from the high level of aggregation in the smart grid will put end-users in position to change their consumption patterns, offering useful benefits for the system as a whole.<br/

Fluorescence Properties of Photonic Crystals Doped with Perylenediimide

This study aims to present the fabrication of colloidal photonic crystals (PC) with increased fluorescence properties. The use of a highly fluorescent perylenediimide derivate (PDI) during the soap-free emulsion polymerization of styrene–acrylic acid resulted in monodisperse core–shell particles which allowed the fabrication of PC films. The properties of the hybrid material were studied in comparison with hybrid materials obtained by impregnation of films with chromophore solutions. In both cases an increase of the fluorescence response was observed in addition to a blue shift for the PDI core particles, proving the incorporation of the dye inside the copolymer particles

Enabling cooperative behavior for building demand response based on extended joint action learning

This paper explores the use of distributed intelligence to assist the integration of the demand as a flexible resource, to mitigate the emerging uncertainty in the power system, while fulfilling the customer's local needs, i.e., comfort management. More exactly, our contribution is twofold. First, we propose a novel cooperative and decentralized reinforcement learning method, dubbed extended joint action learning (eJAL). Second, we perform a comparison between eJAL to noncooperative decentralized decision making strategies, i.e., Q-learning, and a centralized game theoretic approach, i.e., Nash n-player game. This comparison has been conducted on the basis of grid support effectiveness and the loss of comfort for each customer. Various metrics were used to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of each method. We demonstrated that a range of flexibility requests can be met by providing an optimal energy portfolio of buildings without substantially violating comfort constraints. Moreover, we showed that the proposed eJAL method achieves the highest fairness index.</p

Enabling cooperative behavior for building demand response based on extended joint action learning

This paper explores the use of distributed intelligence to assist the integration of the demand as a flexible resource, to mitigate the emerging uncertainty in the power system, while fulfilling the customer's local needs, i.e., comfort management. More exactly, our contribution is twofold. First, we propose a novel cooperative and decentralized reinforcement learning method, dubbed extended joint action learning (eJAL). Second, we perform a comparison between eJAL to noncooperative decentralized decision making strategies, i.e., Q-learning, and a centralized game theoretic approach, i.e., Nash n-player game. This comparison has been conducted on the basis of grid support effectiveness and the loss of comfort for each customer. Various metrics were used to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of each method. We demonstrated that a range of flexibility requests can be met by providing an optimal energy portfolio of buildings without substantially violating comfort constraints. Moreover, we showed that the proposed eJAL method achieves the highest fairness index.</p