A Contextual Bandit Approach for Value-oriented Prediction Interval Forecasting

Prediction interval (PI) is an effective tool to quantify uncertainty and usually serves as an input to downstream robust optimization. Traditional approaches focus on improving the quality of PI in the view of statistical scores and assume the improvement in quality will lead to a higher value in the power systems operation. However, such an assumption cannot always hold in practice. In this paper, we propose a value-oriented PI forecasting approach, which aims at reducing operational costs in downstream operations. For that, it is required to issue PIs with the guidance of operational costs in robust optimization, which is addressed within the contextual bandit framework here. Concretely, the agent is used to select the optimal quantile proportion, while the environment reveals the costs in operations as rewards to the agent. As such, the agent can learn the policy of quantile proportion selection for minimizing the operational cost. The numerical study regarding a two-timescale operation of a virtual power plant verifies the superiority of the proposed approach in terms of operational value. And it is especially evident in the context of extensive penetration of wind power.Comment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on Smart Gri

Investigation and optimization of the cable force of a combined highway and railway steel truss cable-stayed bridge in completion state

In order to study the reasonable cable force of a highway and rail dual-purpose steel truss cable-stayed bridge in the completion state, this paper employs four methods, i.e. the rigid supported continuous beam method, bending minimum energy method, influence matrix method and BP neural network method combined with a genetic algorithm. The Baijusi Yangtze river bridge, with a main span of 660 m in the completion state, is chosen as the object of study. Through comparative analysis, it is found that the rigid supported continuous beam combined with the influence matrix method can determine the reasonable cable force of the highway and rail dual-purpose steel truss cable-stayed bridge more quickly and effectively