Enabling Micro-level Demand-Side Grid Flexiblity in Resource Constrained Environments

The increased penetration of uncertain and variable renewable energy presents various resource and operational electric grid challenges. Micro-level (household and small commercial) demand-side grid flexibility could be a cost-effective strategy to integrate high penetrations of wind and solar energy, but literature and field deployments exploring the necessary information and communication technologies (ICTs) are scant. This paper presents an exploratory framework for enabling information driven grid flexibility through the Internet of Things (IoT), and a proof-of-concept wireless sensor gateway (FlexBox) to collect the necessary parameters for adequately monitoring and actuating the micro-level demand-side. In the summer of 2015, thirty sensor gateways were deployed in the city of Managua (Nicaragua) to develop a baseline for a near future small-scale demand response pilot implementation. FlexBox field data has begun shedding light on relationships between ambient temperature and load energy consumption, load and building envelope energy efficiency challenges, latency communication network challenges, and opportunities to engage existing demand-side user behavioral patterns. Information driven grid flexibility strategies present great opportunity to develop new technologies, system architectures, and implementation approaches that can easily scale across regions, incomes, and levels of development

Spectral Signatures of the Diffusional Anomaly in Water

Analysis of power spectrum profiles for various tagged particle quantities in bulk SPC/E water is used to demonstrate that variations in mobility associated with the diffusional anomaly are mirrored in the exponent of the \onebyf\ region. Monitoring of \onebyf behaviour is shown to be a simple and direct method for linking phenomena on three distinctive length and time scales: the local molecular environment, hydrogen bond network reorganisations and the diffusivity. The results indicate that experimental studies of supercooled water to probe the density dependence of $1/f^\alpha$ spectral features, or equivalent stretched exponential behaviour in time-correlation functions, will be of interest.Comment: 5 Pages, 4 Figure

Smart city services over a future Internet platform based on Internet of Things and cloud: the smart parking case

Enhancing the effectiveness of city services and assisting on a more sustainable development of cities are two of the crucial drivers of the smart city concept. This paper portrays a field trial that leverages an internet of things (IoT) platform intended for bringing value to existing and future smart city infrastructures. The paper highlights how IoT creates the basis permitting integration of current vertical city services into an all-encompassing system, which opens new horizons for the progress of the effectiveness and sustainability of our cities. Additionally, the paper describes a field trial on provisioning of real time data about available parking places both indoor and outdoor. The trial has been carried out at Santander’s (Spain) downtown area. The trial takes advantage of both available open data sets as well as of a large-scale IoT infrastructure. The trial is a showcase on how added-value services can be created on top of the proposed architecture.This work has been partially funded by the research project SmartSantander, under FP7-ICT-2009-5 of the 7th Framework Programme of the European Community. This work has been supported by the Spanish government (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional, FEDER) by means of the project ADVICE “Dynamic provisioning of connectivity in high density 5G wireless scenarios” (TEC2015-71329-C2-1-R)

Smart City Governance Strategies to better move towards a Smart Urbanism

This paper intends to summarize the principal reached objectives of an ongoing project on smart cities governance called GHOST financed by MIUR (Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research), in order to provide an overview on how the smart governance analysis applied to smart urbanism has evolved in two particular case studies in Italy (Cagliari and Florence). Firstly, authors analyze the concept of ‘Smart City Governance’ (SCG), it is associated with a set of commonly accepted terminologies and not yet standardized even if nowadays academic attention to smart cities and their governance is growing rapidly. Secondly, this paper analyses the major aspects of smart city governance applied to case studies from: (i) the governance data acquisition approach with particular reference to tourism sector, and (ii) the adaptations of urban strategies (in general) and of these data acquisition in Florence and in Cagliari (in particular), due to the Km4city city dashboard, created and developed by the DISIT lab. The paper concludes by evaluating the emerged results of the case studies analysis, in order to find the necessary balance for urban synergies, and, consequently, to better move towards a smart urbanism