Heating Up

I read the following articles:

- A Negotiation Protocol for Multiple Interdependent Issues Negotiation Over Energy Exchange

This paper proposes a negotiation protocol in which off-grid households assumed to have renewable energy generation and electricity storage facilities exchange energy. Agents may benefit more through exchanging energy as they will reduce their storage losses. I liked the idea of the creation of a grid which is formed by off-grid households that generates their own energy and exchange the energy among themselves.

- Practical Distributed Coalition Formation via Heuristic Negotiation in Social Networks

The paper provides a novel framework for decentralised coalition formation in social networks. In the framework, agents can form coalitions without knowing peer's preferences through negotiations.  It is also demonstrated that the new negotiation strategy can increase social welfare by up to 10%.

- A Scoring Rule-Based Mechanism for Aggregate Demand Prediction in the Smart Grid

The mechanism called sum of others' plus(SOM) is developed to fairly distribute the savings obtained by agents. Unlike uniform mechanism which divides the savings equally among agents, SOM divides the savings according to each agent's contribution. This encourages agents to produce more accurate and costly estimates of future events.

- A panel model for predicting the diversity of internal temperatures from English dwellings

 

This work utilises panel methods to create a model which predicts internal temperature of households with more accuracy. The model considers both building stocks and human behaviour to predict internal temperature demand.  The number of occupants, household income, occupant age, building typology, building age, roof insulation thickness and wall U-value are some of the factors included in the model. The model can predict internal temperature of different building stocks within ~0.71°C at 95% confidence and explain 45% of the change of internal temperature among households.

 

- Use and usability of central heating controls

 

In this paper, the usability of heating controls is assessed through an experiment in which participants are asked to perform some tasks which represent the functionalities provided by the control. The result of the experiment states that heating controls are not well-designed enough to clearly express its all functionalities as the participants had difficulties to perform the most of the tasks.