In today's world striving for efficiency in every sector, especially power generation and distribution, smart grids emerge as the solution for efficiently meeting the increasing demand. They adjust themselves to optimally deliver energy at the lowest cost and highest quality possible. The grid successfully makes use of renewable energy resources, electric vehicles, and smart pricing techniques in its attempt to achieve energy efficiency. It also promotes a greener environment by striving to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Information communication technology (ICT) helps the grid in collecting consumption data from the consumers and in sharing tariff information. ICT also helps to gather information about the status of the grid with regard to aspects like power quality, faults etc. The purpose of this paper is to review recent literature with a view to comprehensively present the technologies employed in the smart grid for achieving energy efficiency and the challenges involved therein. 相似文献
Glass plies can be bonded together by polymeric interlayers to form laminated glass. Thanks to the capacity in finding alternative stress paths after partial breakage, it is commonly accepted that the more the layers are, the higher the safety level is. However, a negative aspect is that the tensile strength of glass carries a size effect in terms of surface area, which increases with lamination. Here we evaluate these competing factors by calibrating the partial safety factors to be used in semi-probabilistic (level-I) design, through comparison with probabilistic (level-III) methods in paradigmatic case-studies under wind, snow, and dead weight. Starting from a two-parameter Weibull distribution for glass strength, the “failure modes” approach determines the statistical distribution of strength for a multi-laminate as a function of the number of plies, which interferes with the statistics for actions. As a function of the target probability of failure for the assigned class of consequence, we introduce a new coefficient in the verification formula of level-I, to account for the effects of lamination with dependence upon the number of plies. We find that there is strong gain when passing from a monolith to a two-ply laminate, but the advantage fades by increasing the number of layers. Verification formulas of this type could avoid overconservative design. 相似文献
The probabilistic learning on manifolds (PLoM) introduced in 2016 has solved difficult supervised problems for the “small data” limit where the number N of points in the training set is small. Many extensions have since been proposed, making it possible to deal with increasingly complex cases. However, the performance limit has been observed and explained for applications for which N is very small and for which the dimension of the diffusion-map basis is close to N. For these cases, we propose a novel extension based on the introduction of a partition in independent random vectors. We take advantage of this development to present improvements of the PLoM such as a simplified algorithm for constructing the diffusion-map basis and a new mathematical result for quantifying the concentration of the probability measure in terms of a probability upper bound. The analysis of the efficiency of this extension is presented through two applications. 相似文献
The supply of electrical energy is critical to convenient and comfortable living. However, people consume a large amount of energy, contributing to an energy crisis and global warming, and damaging some ecological cycles. Residential electricity consumption has greater elasticity than industrial and business consumption; it therefore has high energy-saving potential. This work establishes an automated platform, which provides information about residential electricity consumption in each city in Taiwan. Machine learning was used to forecast future residential electricity demand. A nature-inspired optimization method was applied to enhance the accuracy of the best machine learner, yielding an even better hybrid ensemble model. Performance measures indicate that the resulting model is accurate and provides effective information for reference. An automatic web-based system based on the model was combined with a web crawler and scheduled to run automatically to provide information on monthly residential electricity consumption in each county and city. By providing energy consumption information across the country, power providers and government can discuss policy and set different goals for energy use. The results of this study can facilitate the early implementation of energy-saving and carbon emission-reducing in cities and aid utility companies in establishing energy conservation guidelines. 相似文献
Building client/owners need estimates of likely construction costs for budgeting purposes early in the procurement process when little detailed design information is available beyond the type, size and location of the facility. One of the more sophisticated techniques available for this purpose is the storey enclosure method, developed by James in 1954. This uses the basic physical measurements of the building envelope, together with an arbitrary set of multipliers, or weights, to forecast tender/bid prices. Although seldom used in practice, James succeeded in showing his method to be capable of significantly outperforming alternative approaches.
The research reported in this paper aimed firstly to reassess James’ claims with new data and secondly to advance his method by using regression techniques to obtain the weights involved. Based on data from 138 completed Hong Kong projects for four types of building, two types of regression models were developed. This involved the use of sophisticated features such as leave-one-out cross validation to simulate the way in which forecasts are produced in practice and a dual stepwise selection strategy that enhances the chance of identifying the best model. An algorithm was also designed to select the appropriate parametric and non-parametric tests for objective and rigorous model evaluation against alternatives.
The results indicate that, contrary to James’ claim, both his original method and the two regression-based alternatives are not significantly better or worse than other models. Surprisingly, the widely used floor area model was found to under-perform in terms of consistency for offices and private housing. For private housing in particular, it was felt that the storey enclosure method was likely to offer good prospects of improvement on those methods currently in use in practice. 相似文献