Living heritage conservation

Living Heritage is characterized by ‘continuity’, in particular those historic places that are still a ‘living’ part of their community. In China, the mainstream of living heritage conservation is shifting from commodity-oriented renewal to culture-oriented and people-centred revival, which has obviously displayed in many planning practices. This paper centres on the connotation of living heritage and explores its applications approaches through two conservation practices in Nanjing, China. In the first project, the author conceived a brand-new way of protecting and revealing historic streets, named ‘Reflection Alley’. It treats the street as an open museum, utilizing current semi-dismantled remains, providing a stage for dialogues between history and modernity, endowing the historic legacy with a sustainable future. In the second project, a ‘Five-stakeholder Platform’ is set up to support the progressive revitalization of a historic district. Through in-depth community engagement, the design team have developed a three-phase planning guide helping locals to protect and repair their residences thus stimulating the vitality of community life. The paper provides solutions for the implementation of culture-oriented and people-centred revival through the interaction between tangible and intangible parts and the connections to community

Marginal Structural Illness-Death Models for Semi-Competing Risks Data

The three-state illness death model has been established as a general approach for regression analysis of semi-competing risks data. For observational data the marginal structural models (MSM) are a useful tool, under the potential outcomes framework to define and estimate parameters with causal interpretations. In this paper we introduce a class of marginal structural illness death models for the analysis of observational semi competing risks data. We consider two specific such models, the usual Markov illness death MSM and the general Markov illness death MSM where the latter incorporates a frailty term. For interpretation purposes, risk contrasts under the MSMs are defined. Inference under the usual Markov MSM can be carried out using estimating equations with inverse probability weighting, while inference under the general Markov MSM requires a weighted EM algorithm. We study the inference procedures under both MSMs using extensive simulations, and apply them to the analysis of mid-life alcohol exposure on late life cognitive impairment as well as mortality using the Honolulu-Asia Aging Study data set. The R codes developed in this work have been implemented in the R package semicmprskcoxmsm that is publicly available on CRAN

Optimal Battery Energy Storage Placement for Transient Voltage Stability Enhancement

A placement problem for multiple Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) units is formulated towards power system transient voltage stability enhancement in this paper. The problem is solved by the Cross-Entropy (CE) optimization method. A simulation-based approach is adopted to incorporate higher-order dynamics and nonlinearities of generators and loads. The objective is to maximize the voltage stability index, which is set up based on certain grid-codes. Formulations of the optimization problem are then discussed. Finally, the proposed approach is implemented in MATLAB/DIgSILENT and tested on the New England 39-Bus system. Results indicate that installing BESS units at the optimized location can alleviate transient voltage instability issue compared with the original system with no BESS. The CE placement algorithm is also compared with the classic PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) method, and its superiority is demonstrated in terms of fewer iterations for convergence with better solution qualities.Comment: This paper has been accepted by the 2019 IEEE PES General Meeting at Atlanta, GA in August 201

Multi-category Comparative Analysis of Factors Affecting E-commerce Sales

With the continuous development of e-commerce, more and more types of goods are sold online, so merchants should develop different sales strategies for different types of goods. This paper firstly selects 15 variables to build a stepwise regression model. In the analysis of influencing factors on sales of products in different categories, we find that there are significant differences in the impact of the number of appended reviews and pictures reviews on the sales of utilitarian and hedonic products. In the analysis of influencing factors on sales of products in the same category, we find that the factors influencing the sales of different clothing products are also different to some extent. At last, we put forward some suggestions on adjusting price and title length, and writing product details. This paper is more detailed in variable selection and product classification than some previous studies. It is meaningful for merchants to optimize sales plans and improve product sales

Submodular Load Clustering with Robust Principal Component Analysis

Traditional load analysis is facing challenges with the new electricity usage patterns due to demand response as well as increasing deployment of distributed generations, including photovoltaics (PV), electric vehicles (EV), and energy storage systems (ESS). At the transmission system, despite of irregular load behaviors at different areas, highly aggregated load shapes still share similar characteristics. Load clustering is to discover such intrinsic patterns and provide useful information to other load applications, such as load forecasting and load modeling. This paper proposes an efficient submodular load clustering method for transmission-level load areas. Robust principal component analysis (R-PCA) firstly decomposes the annual load profiles into low-rank components and sparse components to extract key features. A novel submodular cluster center selection technique is then applied to determine the optimal cluster centers through constructed similarity graph. Following the selection results, load areas are efficiently assigned to different clusters for further load analysis and applications. Numerical results obtained from PJM load demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.Comment: Accepted by 2019 IEEE PES General Meeting, Atlanta, G