400 research outputs found
Risk Limiting Dispatch with Ramping Constraints
Reliable operation in power systems is becoming more difficult as the
penetration of random renewable resources increases. In particular, operators
face the risk of not scheduling enough traditional generators in the times when
renewable energies becomes lower than expected. In this paper we study the
optimal trade-off between system and risk, and the cost of scheduling reserve
generators. We explicitly model the ramping constraints on the generators. We
model the problem as a multi-period stochastic control problem, and we show the
structure of the optimal dispatch. We then show how to efficiently compute the
dispatch using two methods: i) solving a surrogate chance constrained program,
ii) a MPC-type look ahead controller. Using real world data, we show the chance
constrained dispatch outperforms the MPC controller and is also robust to
changes in the probability distribution of the renewables.Comment: Shorter version submitted to smartgrid comm 201
Online Modified Greedy Algorithm for Storage Control under Uncertainty
This paper studies the general problem of operating energy storage under
uncertainty. Two fundamental sources of uncertainty are considered, namely the
uncertainty in the unexpected fluctuation of the net demand process and the
uncertainty in the locational marginal prices. We propose a very simple
algorithm termed Online Modified Greedy (OMG) algorithm for this problem. A
stylized analysis for the algorithm is performed, which shows that comparing to
the optimal cost of the corresponding stochastic control problem, the
sub-optimality of OMG is bounded and approaches zero in various scenarios. This
suggests that, albeit simple, OMG is guaranteed to have good performance in
some cases; and in other cases, OMG together with the sub-optimality bound can
be used to provide a lower bound for the optimal cost. Such a lower bound can
be valuable in evaluating other heuristic algorithms. For the latter cases, a
semidefinite program is derived to minimize the sub-optimality bound of OMG.
Numerical experiments are conducted to verify our theoretical analysis and to
demonstrate the use of the algorithm.Comment: 14 page version of a paper submitted to IEEE trans on Power System
Distributed Online Modified Greedy Algorithm for Networked Storage Operation under Uncertainty
The integration of intermittent and stochastic renewable energy resources
requires increased flexibility in the operation of the electric grid. Storage,
broadly speaking, provides the flexibility of shifting energy over time;
network, on the other hand, provides the flexibility of shifting energy over
geographical locations. The optimal control of storage networks in stochastic
environments is an important open problem. The key challenge is that, even in
small networks, the corresponding constrained stochastic control problems on
continuous spaces suffer from curses of dimensionality, and are intractable in
general settings. For large networks, no efficient algorithm is known to give
optimal or provably near-optimal performance for this problem. This paper
provides an efficient algorithm to solve this problem with performance
guarantees. We study the operation of storage networks, i.e., a storage system
interconnected via a power network. An online algorithm, termed Online Modified
Greedy algorithm, is developed for the corresponding constrained stochastic
control problem. A sub-optimality bound for the algorithm is derived, and a
semidefinite program is constructed to minimize the bound. In many cases, the
bound approaches zero so that the algorithm is near-optimal. A task-based
distributed implementation of the online algorithm relying only on local
information and neighbor communication is then developed based on the
alternating direction method of multipliers. Numerical examples verify the
established theoretical performance bounds, and demonstrate the scalability of
the algorithm.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1405.778
Combining Subgoal Graphs with Reinforcement Learning to Build a Rational Pathfinder
In this paper, we present a hierarchical path planning framework called SG-RL
(subgoal graphs-reinforcement learning), to plan rational paths for agents
maneuvering in continuous and uncertain environments. By "rational", we mean
(1) efficient path planning to eliminate first-move lags; (2) collision-free
and smooth for agents with kinematic constraints satisfied. SG-RL works in a
two-level manner. At the first level, SG-RL uses a geometric path-planning
method, i.e., Simple Subgoal Graphs (SSG), to efficiently find optimal abstract
paths, also called subgoal sequences. At the second level, SG-RL uses an RL
method, i.e., Least-Squares Policy Iteration (LSPI), to learn near-optimal
motion-planning policies which can generate kinematically feasible and
collision-free trajectories between adjacent subgoals. The first advantage of
the proposed method is that SSG can solve the limitations of sparse reward and
local minima trap for RL agents; thus, LSPI can be used to generate paths in
complex environments. The second advantage is that, when the environment
changes slightly (i.e., unexpected obstacles appearing), SG-RL does not need to
reconstruct subgoal graphs and replan subgoal sequences using SSG, since LSPI
can deal with uncertainties by exploiting its generalization ability to handle
changes in environments. Simulation experiments in representative scenarios
demonstrate that, compared with existing methods, SG-RL can work well on
large-scale maps with relatively low action-switching frequencies and shorter
path lengths, and SG-RL can deal with small changes in environments. We further
demonstrate that the design of reward functions and the types of training
environments are important factors for learning feasible policies.Comment: 20 page
Online Energy Storage Management: an Algorithmic Approach
Motivated by the importance of energy storage networks in smart grids, we provide an algorithmic study of the online energy storage management problem in a network setting, the first to the best of our knowledge. Given online power supplies, either entirely renewable supplies or those in combination with traditional supplies, we want to route power from the supplies to demands using storage units subject to a decay factor. Our goal is to maximize the total utility of satisfied demands less the total production cost of routed power. We model renewable supplies with the zero production cost function and traditional supplies with convex production cost functions. For two natural storage unit settings, private and public, we design poly-logarithmic competitive algorithms in the network flow model using the dual fitting and online primal dual methods for convex problems. Furthermore, we show strong hardness results for more general settings of the problem. Our techniques may be of independent interest in other routing and storage management problems
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