5,737 research outputs found
Documentation and knowledge acquisition
Traditional approaches to knowledge acquisition have focused on interviews. An alternative focuses on the documentation associated with a domain. Adopting a documentation approach provides some advantages during familiarization. A knowledge management tool was constructed to gain these advantages
Optimal Hour-Ahead Bidding in the Real-Time Electricity Market with Battery Storage using Approximate Dynamic Programming
There is growing interest in the use of grid-level storage to smooth
variations in supply that are likely to arise with increased use of wind and
solar energy. Energy arbitrage, the process of buying, storing, and selling
electricity to exploit variations in electricity spot prices, is becoming an
important way of paying for expensive investments into grid-level storage.
Independent system operators such as the NYISO (New York Independent System
Operator) require that battery storage operators place bids into an hour-ahead
market (although settlements may occur in increments as small as 5 minutes,
which is considered near "real-time"). The operator has to place these bids
without knowing the energy level in the battery at the beginning of the hour,
while simultaneously accounting for the value of leftover energy at the end of
the hour. The problem is formulated as a dynamic program. We describe and
employ a convergent approximate dynamic programming (ADP) algorithm that
exploits monotonicity of the value function to find a revenue-generating
bidding policy; using optimal benchmarks, we empirically show the computational
benefits of the algorithm. Furthermore, we propose a distribution-free variant
of the ADP algorithm that does not require any knowledge of the distribution of
the price process (and makes no assumptions regarding a specific real-time
price model). We demonstrate that a policy trained on historical real-time
price data from the NYISO using this distribution-free approach is indeed
effective.Comment: 28 pages, 11 figure
Analyzing Social Issues within Rock Island’s Christian Communities
This research asks how Christians within the Quad Cities Area understand prevalent American social issues. Through my research, I explored how homophobia, racism, and gender discrimination fit within the context of American Christianity. I conducted interviews and participant observation with two different communities within the Rock Island area: Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, and the Quad Cities Mainspring Ministry. My research examines several major themes: race, sexuality, gender, and socioeconomic status, and through my research I concluded that religion is a major factor in contributing to how my participants have viewed these themes
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