Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Energy



Artificial Intelligence Could Have Helped Alleviate Suffering From Texas Blackouts

#artificialintelligence

A powerful once-in-a-decade winter storm in February resulted in the near total collapse of Texas' power grid, resulting in residential and commercial areas suffering days-long blackouts, which led to at least 57 deaths and billions of dollars in property damage across the state's 254 counties. In addition, some Texans who did have power are facing overcharges of about $16 billion for electricity consumed during the weeklong crisis, according to a watchdog for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the quasi-governmental entity that oversees the Lone Star State's power grid. While debates as to the root causes of the grid's failure are likely to go on for months if not years, some energy experts contend that a potential solution exists that could have alleviated some of the worst effects of the power shutdown – the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) into the management of the grid. Artificial Intelligence is loosely defined as the use of computer systems to process large volumes of data in order to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition and decision-making. Although AI technology has been embraced by a number of other economic sectors, such as retail and insurance industries, the operators of the U.S. power grid have been slower to adopt it.


Integrating 2D and 3D Digital Plant Information Towards Automatic Generation of Digital Twins

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Ongoing standardization in Industry 4.0 supports tool vendor neutral representations of Piping and Instrumentation diagrams as well as 3D pipe routing. However, a complete digital plant model requires combining these two representations. 3D pipe routing information is essential for building any accurate first-principles process simulation model. Piping and instrumentation diagrams are the primary source for control loops. In order to automatically integrate these information sources to a unified digital plant model, it is necessary to develop algorithms for identifying corresponding elements such as tanks and pumps from piping and instrumentation diagrams and 3D CAD models. One approach is to raise these two information sources to a common level of abstraction and to match them at this level of abstraction. Graph matching is a potential technique for this purpose. This article focuses on automatic generation of the graphs as a prerequisite to graph matching. Algorithms for this purpose are proposed and validated with a case study. The paper concludes with a discussion of further research needed to reprocess the generated graphs in order to enable effective matching.


Intelligent Building Control Systems for Thermal Comfort and Energy-Efficiency: A Systematic Review of Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Techniques

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Building operations represent a significant percentage of the total primary energy consumed in most countries due to the proliferation of Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) installations in response to the growing demand for improved thermal comfort. Reducing the associated energy consumption while maintaining comfortable conditions in buildings are conflicting objectives and represent a typical optimization problem that requires intelligent system design. Over the last decade, different methodologies based on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques have been deployed to find the sweet spot between energy use in HVAC systems and suitable indoor comfort levels to the occupants. This paper performs a comprehensive and an in-depth systematic review of AI-based techniques used for building control systems by assessing the outputs of these techniques, and their implementations in the reviewed works, as well as investigating their abilities to improve the energy-efficiency, while maintaining thermal comfort conditions. This enables a holistic view of (1) the complexities of delivering thermal comfort to users inside buildings in an energy-efficient way, and (2) the associated bibliographic material to assist researchers and experts in the field in tackling such a challenge. Among the 20 AI tools developed for both energy consumption and comfort control, functions such as identification and recognition patterns, optimization, predictive control. Based on the findings of this work, the application of AI technology in building control is a promising area of research and still an ongoing, i.e., the performance of AI-based control is not yet completely satisfactory. This is mainly due in part to the fact that these algorithms usually need a large amount of high-quality real-world data, which is lacking in the building or, more precisely, the energy sector.


An Artificial Intelligence Framework for Bidding Optimization with Uncertainty in Multiple Frequency Reserve Markets

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The global ambitions of a carbon-neutral society necessitate a stable and robust smart grid that capitalises on frequency reserves of renewable energy. Frequency reserves are resources that adjust power production or consumption in real time to react to a power grid frequency deviation. Revenue generation motivates the availability of these resources for managing such deviations. However, limited research has been conducted on data-driven decisions and optimal bidding strategies for trading such capacities in multiple frequency reserves markets. We address this limitation by making the following research contributions. Firstly, a generalised model is designed based on an extensive study of critical characteristics of global frequency reserves markets. Secondly, three bidding strategies are proposed, based on this market model, to capitalise on price peaks in multi-stage markets. Two strategies are proposed for non-reschedulable loads, in which case the bidding strategy aims to select the market with the highest anticipated price, and the third bidding strategy focuses on rescheduling loads to hours on which highest reserve market prices are anticipated. The third research contribution is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based bidding optimization framework that implements these three strategies, with novel uncertainty metrics that supplement data-driven price prediction. Finally, the framework is evaluated empirically using a case study of multiple frequency reserves markets in Finland. The results from this evaluation confirm the effectiveness of the proposed bidding strategies and the AI-based bidding optimization framework in terms of cumulative revenue generation, leading to an increased availability of frequency reserves.


Comparing Weak- and Unsupervised Methods for Resonant Anomaly Detection

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Anomaly detection techniques are growing in importance at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), motivated by the increasing need to search for new physics in a model-agnostic way. In this work, we provide a detailed comparative study between a well-studied unsupervised method called the autoencoder (AE) and a weakly-supervised approach based on the Classification Without Labels (CWoLa) technique. We examine the ability of the two methods to identify a new physics signal at different cross sections in a fully hadronic resonance search. By construction, the AE classification performance is independent of the amount of injected signal. In contrast, the CWoLa performance improves with increasing signal abundance. When integrating these approaches with a complete background estimate, we find that the two methods have complementary sensitivity. In particular, CWoLa is effective at finding diverse and moderately rare signals while the AE can provide sensitivity to very rare signals, but only with certain topologies. We therefore demonstrate that both techniques are complementary and can be used together for anomaly detection at the LHC.


Alternative Financial Data - Using alternative data sets to find an edge

#artificialintelligence

At the center of the growing digital economy is data. Data is to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century. In every industry, it are the companies that can use data effectively that succeed. And investing is no different. In their search for alpha generating ideas, investment managers are increasingly turning to sources of alternative financial data. But what is alternative data and how does it give fund managers an edge? The returns generated by investors can be classified as either alpha or beta.


A streamlined approach to determining thermal properties of crystalline solids and alloys

#artificialintelligence

In a September 2020 essay in Nature Energy, three scientists posed several "grand challenges" -- one of which was to find suitable materials for thermal energy storage devices that could be used in concert with solar energy systems. Fortuitously, Mingda Li -- the Norman C. Rasmussen Assistant Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT, who heads the department's Quantum Matter Group -- was already thinking along similar lines. In fact, Li and nine collaborators (from MIT, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Argonne National Laboratory) were developing a new methodology, involving a novel machine-learning approach, that would make it faster and easier to identify materials with favorable properties for thermal energy storage and other uses. The results of their investigation appear this month in a paper for Advanced Science. "This is a revolutionary approach that promises to accelerate the design of new functional materials," comments physicist Jaime Fernandez-Baca, a distinguished staff member at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.


Power Virtual Agents & Power Automate - Truly Powerful! - BotCore

#artificialintelligence

PVA is a low-code chatbot building tool with which you can build and deploy chatbots in the shortest time possible. This democratises the technology to non-technical users and reduces the dependency on IT expertise. Using PVA, powerful chatbots can be built using a guided, no-code graphical interface that can be deployed for sales, HR, finance, customer service and virtually on all channels where customers need to be engaged. Bot Framework and Azure Bot Service and Cognitive Services provide the technological foundation for Power Virtual Agents. A power business user can go from zero to a working bot in a matter of minutes!


Business Applications For Artificial Intelligence And Machine Learning

#artificialintelligence

AI and ML applications will help your business improve efficiency. They will allow you to abandon routine tasks that slow down the processes in your company. AI and ML solutions will help automate algorithms and processes in your company, which will lead to cost savings and increased profits. Using AI applications, you can focus on more important tasks. Where else if not in the energy industry, AI has found a use.