Decentralized cooperative scheduling of prosumer flexibility under forecast uncertainties

Scheduling of prosumer flexibility is challenging in finding an optimal allocation of energy resources for heterogeneous prosumer goals under various forecast uncertainties and operation constraints. This study addresses this challenge by introducing a bottom-up framework for cooperative flexibility scheduling that relies on a decentralized network of scheduling agents to perform a coordinated decision-making and select a subset of households’ net load schedules that fulfills the techno-socio-economic prosumer objectives in the resource operation modes and ensures the reliability of the grid. The resource flexibility in terms of alternative operation schedules is mathematically modeled with multiobjective optimization that attains economic, environmental, and energy self-sufficiency prosumer goals with respect to their relative importance. The coordination is achieved with a privacy-preserving collective learning algorithm that aims to reduce the aggregated peak demand of the households considering prosumers’ willingness to cooperate and accept a less preferred resource schedule. By utilizing the framework and real-world data, the novel case study is demonstrated for prosumers equipped with solar battery systems in a community microgrid. The findings show that the flexibility scheduling with an optimal prosumer cooperation level decreases the global costs of collective peak shaving by 83% while increasing the local prosumer costs by 28% in comparison with noncooperative scheduling. However, the forecast uncertainty in net load and parameters of the frequency containment reserve causes imbalances in the planned schedules. It is suggested that the imbalances can be decreased if the flexibility modeling takes into account variable specific levels of forecast uncertainty

Energy governance as a commons: Engineering alternative socio-technical configurations

Transitioning into a sustainable energy system is becoming ever more pressing as the reality of an anthropogenic ecological crisis becomes difficult to ignore. Due to the complexity of the matter, proposed solutions often address the symptoms of the current socioeconomic configuration rather than its core. To conceptualise possible future energy systems, this Perspective focuses on the disconnect between science and technology and engineering studies. On the one hand, this disconnect leads to social science research that passively critiques rather than contributes to tackling societal issues in practice. On the other, it produces technical work limited by the incumbent conceptualisations of economic activity and organisational configurations around production without capturing the broader social and political dynamics. We thus propose a schema for bridging this divide that uses the “commons” as an umbrella concept. We apply this framework on the hardware aspect of a conceptual energy system, which builds on networked microgrids powered by open-source, lower cost, adaptable, socially responsible and sustainable technology. This Perspective is a call to engineers and social scientists alike to form genuine transdisciplinary collaborations for developing radical alternatives to the energy conundrum

Maximising transmission capacity of ad hoc networks via transmission system design

The trade-off involving capacity and interference in wireless networks, using the metric transmission capacity, is investigated. Particularly, it is shown that this metric appropriately captures the effects of this trade-off, and can be used to select the combination of modulation scheme/coding scheme that maximises the transmission efficiency of a wireless ad hoc network modelled as a homogeneous Poisson point process.475348U8

Factors Influencing the Adoption of m-Government: Perspectives from a Namibian Marginalised Community

Mobile-government (m-Government) services adoption is being advanced as an alternative solution for addressing challenges faced by electronic-government (e-Government) adoption in marginalised communities. However, factors of m-Government need to be understood if it is to be adopted by marginalised communities. There are suggestions that many contextual factors affect to the adoption of m-Government services. In this study, factors of m-Government in Oniipa, a marginalised rural community in Namibia are researched. Results show that security, technology trust, ICT supporting infrastructure, usage experience, costs, awareness, skills for accessing m-Government, language literacy, training, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, social influence, perceived empathy and compatibility are critical factors of m-Government services adoption. The study findings shall be used to propel m-Government adoption in a Fusion Grid project that aims to address infrastructural challenges faced by marginal communities when adopting e-Government. Similarly, policy makers can draw lessons on m-Government adoption from this study.Peer reviewe