This article investigates the optimization of yaw control inputs of a nine-turbine wind farm. The wind farm is simulated using the high-fidelity simulator SOWFA. The optimization is performed with a modifier adaptation scheme based on Gaussian processes. Modifier adaptation corrects for the mismatch between plant and model and helps to converge to the actual plan optimum. In the case study the modifier adaptation approach is compared with the Bayesian optimization approach. Moreover, the use of two different covariance functions in the Gaussian process regression is discussed. Practical recommendations concerning the data preparation and application of the approach are given. It is shown that both the modifier adaptation and the Bayesian optimization approach can improve the power production with overall smaller yaw misalignments in comparison to the Gaussian wake model.

Weather forecasting is a long standing scientific challenge with direct social and economic impact. The task is suitable for deep neural networks due to vast amounts of continuously collected data and a rich spatial and temporal structure that presents long range dependencies. We introduce MetNet, a neural network that forecasts precipitation up to 8 hours into the future at the high spatial resolution of 1 km$^2$ and at the temporal resolution of 2 minutes with a latency in the order of seconds. MetNet takes as input radar and satellite data and forecast lead time and produces a probabilistic precipitation map. The architecture uses axial self-attention to aggregate the global context from a large input patch corresponding to a million square kilometers. We evaluate the performance of MetNet at various precipitation thresholds and find that MetNet outperforms Numerical Weather Prediction at forecasts of up to 7 to 8 hours on the scale of the continental United States.

This paper presents a novel model-reference reinforcement learning control method for uncertain autonomous surface vehicles. The proposed control combines a conventional control method with deep reinforcement learning. With the conventional control, we can ensure the learning-based control law provides closed-loop stability for the overall system, and potentially increase the sample efficiency of the deep reinforcement learning. With the reinforcement learning, we can directly learn a control law to compensate for modeling uncertainties. In the proposed control, a nominal system is employed for the design of a baseline control law using a conventional control approach. The nominal system also defines the desired performance for uncertain autonomous vehicles to follow. In comparison with traditional deep reinforcement learning methods, our proposed learning-based control can provide stability guarantees and better sample efficiency. We demonstrate the performance of the new algorithm via extensive simulation results.

Automated negotiation has been used in a variety of distributed settings, such as privacy in the Internet of Things (IoT) devices and power distribution in Smart Grids. The most common protocol under which these agents negotiate is the Alternating Offers Protocol (AOP). Under this protocol, agents cannot express any additional information to each other besides a counter offer. This can lead to unnecessarily long negotiations when, for example, negotiations are impossible, risking to waste bandwidth that is a precious resource at the edge of the network. While alternative protocols exist which alleviate this problem, these solutions are too complex for low power devices, such as IoT sensors operating at the edge of the network. To improve this bottleneck, we introduce an extension to AOP called Alternating Constrained Offers Protocol (ACOP), in which agents can also express constraints to each other. This allows agents to both search the possibility space more efficiently and recognise impossible situations sooner. We empirically show that agents using ACOP can significantly reduce the number of messages a negotiation takes, independently of the strategy agents choose. In particular, we show our method significantly reduces the number of messages when an agreement is not possible. Furthermore, when an agreement is possible it reaches this agreement sooner with no negative effect on the utility.

Predicting the future is a crucial first step to effective control, since systems that can predict the future can select plans that lead to desired outcomes. In this work, we study the problem of future prediction at the level of 3D scenes, represented by point clouds captured by a LiDAR sensor, i.e., directly learning to forecast the evolution of >100,000 points that comprise a complete scene. We term this Scene Point Cloud Sequence Forecasting (SPCSF). By directly predicting the densest-possible 3D representation of the future, the output contains richer information than other representations such as future object trajectories. We design a method, SPCSFNet, evaluate it on the KITTI and nuScenes datasets, and find that it demonstrates excellent performance on the SPCSF task. To show that SPCSF can benefit downstream tasks such as object trajectory forecasting, we present a new object trajectory forecasting pipeline leveraging SPCSFNet. Specifically, instead of forecasting at the object level as in conventional trajectory forecasting, we propose to forecast at the sensor level and then apply detection and tracking on the predicted sensor data. As a result, our new pipeline can remove the need of object trajectory labels and enable large-scale training with unlabeled sensor data. Surprisingly, we found our new pipeline based on SPCSFNet was able to outperform the conventional pipeline using state-of-the-art trajectory forecasting methods, all of which require future object trajectory labels. Finally, we propose a new evaluation procedure and two new metrics to measure the end-to-end performance of the trajectory forecasting pipeline. Our code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/xinshuoweng/SPCSF

This work presents a hybrid and hierarchical deep learning model for mid-term load forecasting. The model combines exponential smoothing (ETS), advanced Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and ensembling. ETS extracts dynamically the main components of each individual time series and enables the model to learn their representation. Multi-layer LSTM is equipped with dilated recurrent skip connections and a spatial shortcut path from lower layers to allow the model to better capture long-term seasonal relationships and ensure more efficient training. A common learning procedure for LSTM and ETS, with a penalized pinball loss, leads to simultaneous optimization of data representation and forecasting performance. In addition, ensembling at three levels ensures a powerful regularization. A simulation study performed on the monthly electricity demand time series for 35 European countries confirmed the high performance of the proposed model and its competitiveness with classical models such as ARIMA and ETS as well as state-of-the-art models based on machine learning.

This work presents ensemble forecasting of monthly electricity demand using pattern similarity-based forecasting methods (PSFMs). PSFMs applied in this study include $k$-nearest neighbor model, fuzzy neighborhood model, kernel regression model, and general regression neural network. An integral part of PSFMs is a time series representation using patterns of time series sequences. Pattern representation ensures the input and output data unification through filtering a trend and equalizing variance. Two types of ensembles are created: heterogeneous and homogeneous. The former consists of different type base models, while the latter consists of a single-type base model. Five strategies are used for controlling a diversity of members in a homogeneous approach. The diversity is generated using different subsets of training data, different subsets of features, randomly disrupted input and output variables, and randomly disrupted model parameters. An empirical illustration applies the ensemble models as well as individual PSFMs for comparison to the monthly electricity demand forecasting for 35 European countries.

This week we had a chat with J. William Andrew, (Bill), President and CEO of Delaware Electric Cooperative located in Greenwood, Delaware, who educated us on what is the state of AI in his company, and how and why AI is important in the Electric sector. He also told us about different application and the future of AI in Electricity. TAI: How do you rate new / emerging technology adoption by electric co-ops? Why? Andrew: The simplest way I can explain my vision of the importance of the adoption of new technologies is that "The next level of reliability and operational efficiency will not come from adding linemen and bucket trucks but will come from technology adaptation". We must adapt to the wants and needs of our members.

Machine learning techniques always aim to reduce the generalized prediction error. In order to reduce it, ensemble methods present a good approach combining several models that results in a greater forecasting capacity. The Random Machines already have been demonstrated as strong technique, i.e: high predictive power, to classification tasks, in this article we propose an procedure to use the bagged-weighted support vector model to regression problems. Simulation studies were realized over artificial datasets, and over real data benchmarks. The results exhibited a good performance of Regression Random Machines through lower generalization error without needing to choose the best kernel function during tuning process.

Bayesian optimisation is a well-known sample-efficient method for the optimisation of expensive black-box functions. However when dealing with big search spaces the algorithm goes through several low function value regions before reaching the optimum of the function. Since the function evaluations are expensive in terms of both money and time, it may be desirable to alleviate this problem. One approach to subside this cold start phase is to use prior knowledge that can accelerate the optimisation. In its standard form, Bayesian optimisation assumes the likelihood of any point in the search space being the optimum is equal. Therefore any prior knowledge that can provide information about the optimum of the function would elevate the optimisation performance. In this paper, we represent the prior knowledge about the function optimum through a prior distribution. The prior distribution is then used to warp the search space in such a way that space gets expanded around the high probability region of function optimum and shrinks around low probability region of optimum. We incorporate this prior directly in function model (Gaussian process), by redefining the kernel matrix, which allows this method to work with any acquisition function, i.e. acquisition agnostic approach. We show the superiority of our method over standard Bayesian optimisation method through optimisation of several benchmark functions and hyperparameter tuning of two algorithms: Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random forest.