On the Potential of Self-Organizing Energy Systems

In the rapidly evolving field of energy management and autonomous systems, Kristina Wogatai presented her planned dissertation, titled "Exploring the Potential of Self-Organizing Applications in Energy Networks" at the Doctoral Symposium of the 4th IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS 2023). Held from September 25th to 29th in Toronto, Canada, this conference serves as a significant forum for sharing the latest research in autonomous computing, self-adaptation, and self-organization.

Modern society's increasing demands for efficient and sustainable energy management make stable energy supply networks indispensable. However, achieving this stability is challenging due to dynamic environments and diverse constraints from various energy sources. Kristina's research focuses on self-organizing applications as a potential solution to these challenges. These applications enable network components to communicate and collaborate without centralized control, making adaptive decisions to respond to changing conditions.

Inspired by slime molds, Kristina explores their efficient pathways and growth optimization to balance energy demand and load across network components and areas. Her work also addresses the concept of resilience by developing fault-tolerant architectures for energy systems. These architectures incorporate redundant components, alternative pathways, and self-healing mechanisms for network stability, even in the presence of faults or failures.

Additionally, the study explores the integration of nature-inspired approaches with advanced technologies like artificial intelligence to enhance energy grid management. Overall, by focusing on specific research questions and considering the combination of nature-inspired approaches, advanced technologies, and energy grid optimization, this research aims to contribute novel findings and expand the existing body of knowledge in the field of self-organizing applications in energy networks.

Paper

Kristina Wogatai. Exploring the Potential ofSelf-Organizing Applications in Energy Networks. In Proc. IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS), Toronto, Canada, September 25-29, 2023.

Evolving a Self-organizing Energy Market for Microgrids

Graphical user interface of the FREVO plugin

Andrea Monacchi and Wilfried Elmenreich went to Zurich to present their paper about a home energy market simulator at Energieinformatik '2014.
In the presented work, self-organizing behavior between prosumers is implemented at device level via market-based energy allocation solutions. The approach is implemented in a simulator extension to the open framework FREVO, which is released for open use. With the help of FREVO, artificial neural network controllers for energy prosumers are designed using an evolutionary algorithm. Minimizing individual and overall running costs enables a better use of local energy production from renewable sources, while considering residents' necessities to minimize discomfort.

• Andrea Monacchi, Sergii Zhevzhyk, Wilfried Elmenreich. HEMS: A Home Energy Market Simulator. Energieinformatik. Zurich, November 2014.

HEMS: A Home Energy Market Simulator from Andrea Monacchi

Modeling Solar Radiation

In our tutorial at the 2014 IEEE Innovative Smart Grid Technologies - Asia conference, Tamer Khatib and I covered the application of machine learning techniques for energy applications, in particular for modeling solar radiation. In the first part we explored meta-heuristic search algorithms and envisioned their application for designing distributed, self-organizing control systems using evolutionary algorithms. We provide an open-source software tool, FREVO, to conveniently apply this approach of finding the proper configuration of a local agent.

In the second part, we targeted the problem of solar radiation modeling. After stepping through different classical modeling approaches, we presented the possibility of using artificial neural networks to learn the correlation of input parameters such as latitude, longitude, temperature, humidity, month, day, hour to predict global and diffuse solar radiation. Experiments show that this method can achieve a high accuracy compared to existing models.

Links:

• Download FREVO (open source, platform-independent)
• Video: 6 minute introduction to FREVO
• A. Sobe, I. Fehérvári, and W. Elmenreich. FREVO: A tool for evolving and evaluating self-organizing systems. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Evaluation for Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems, Lyon, France, September 2012.
• I. Fehervari and W. Elmenreich. Evolution as a tool to design self-organizing systems. In Self-Organizing Systems, volume LNCS 8221, pages 139–144. Springer Verlag, 2014.
• T. Khatib, A Mohamed, K Sopian. A review of solar energy modeling techniques. J. of Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews. 2012.16(5): 2864-2869.
• T. Khatib, A. Mohamed, K. Sopian, M. Mahmoud. Assessment of Artificial Neural Networks for Hourly Solar Radiation Prediction. J. of Photoenergy. 2012. 2012(ID 946890):1-7.
• IEEE Innovative Smart Grid Technologies - Asia conference site

Smart Grids @ SASO2012

We (Anita Sobe and Istvan Fehervari) are currently at the SASO 2012 in Lyon, the main conference on self-organizing and self-adaptive systems, with approximately 100 attendees. The topics of the talks are very wide spread and therefore the attendees and speakers come from different fields where they apply and analyze various SASO systems.

The first day we attendted the Workshop EVAL4SASO, a special session dedicated for the problem of evaluating such complex SASO systems. Here, we presented our paper:

A. Sobe, I. Fehervari, W. Elmenreich

FREVO: A Tool for Evolving and Evaluating Self-organizing Systems

In IEEE SASO Workshop Eval4SASO, Lyon, France, September 2012

It presents a generic evolutionary framework for rapid prototyping and evaluating research ideas on the design and behavior of evolved complex systems. To illustrate its capabilities, we demonstrated a short demo on a sample problem of dynamic pricing in smart microgrids. FREVO is easy to use and we hope it will assist many researchers and engineers. For further details and downloads, see:

http://frevo.sourceforge.net/

We were positively surprised by the high number of attendees focusing their work on Smart Grids. Although the Smart Grid research field is broad and was also reflected by the diverse presentations, all researchers agreed that there are many dynamic and complex problems that should be tackled by the help of self-organizing algorithms and mechanisms.

Self-Organization and Smart Grids

The Research Days are an annual event concentrating on the core competence of Lakeside Labs - Self-organizing Networked Systems.  During this workshop organized by Lakeside Labs GmbH in cooperation with the University of Klagenfurt, international experts devote themselves to a special topic in self-organization. The event is organized as a five days workshop in July. It takes place at Lakeside Labs in Klagenfurt am Wörthersee, Austria, near a beautiful lake and Alps scenery. Invited experts, local professors, and young researchers discuss and elaborate ideas in the field of Self-Organizing Systems (SOS). The main emphasis of the workshop is on soliciting discussions and creating new ideas regarding a topic related to self-organizing systems. The event greatly supports scientific exchange, networking, establishment of international collaborations, and joint research projects. 

The research days 2012 will target at discussions in self-organization and its application in smart grids. Research and development on applications of self-organization have the potential to provide results across the established domain borders of existing research and engineering disciplines. Self-organization is thus the new paradigm to cope with the emerging complexity of networked applications. Due to the increasing complexity of components, networks and, thus, systems build of these, we face such applications more and more often. One of the great challenges of our time is the transformation of our energy system from fossil fuel resources to sustainable resources. Another chance is the intelligent integration of the behavior of all users (generators and consumers) of an electricity grid to optimize the operation of the system, e.g. by balancing energy consumption based on availability.

The research days will take place in the week of July 9-13, 2012. The opening event will start at 9:30 on Monday July 9. The days will close on Friday, July 13, at noon. A detailed workshop schedule will follow a few weeks before the event.
The registration fee for the workshop is € 500. The technical program including social event takes place from Monday to Thursday. Friday holds a special session were project collaboration and future issues are discussed. Please register until Mai 31 via email at researchdays@lakeside-labs.com
The research days have taken place annually since 2008. Notable results from previous Research Days have been research collaborations, several joint papers, organization of conference special sessions, and the conception and submission of joint research projects in the EU FP7 framework.

The following video gives a nice impression of a past instance of the Research Days:

Further Links

• Research Days 2012 Webpage 
• Lakeside Research Days 2011: Applications of self-organization in technology