Srivatsan Yadhunathan

Evangelos Pournaras, Seoho Jung, Srivatsan Yadhunathan et al.

The penetration of electric vehicles becomes a catalyst for the sustainability of Smart Cities. However, unregulated battery charging remains a challenge causing high energy costs, power peaks or even blackouts. This paper studies this challenge from a socio-technical perspective: social dynamics such as the participation in demand-response programs, the discomfort experienced by alternative suggested vehicle usage times and even the fairness in terms of how equally discomfort is experienced among the population are highly intertwined with Smart Grid reliability. To address challenges of such a socio-technical nature, this paper introduces a fully decentralized and participatory learning mechanism for privacy-preserving coordinated charging control of electric vehicles that regulates three Smart Grid socio-technical aspects: (i) reliability, (ii) discomfort and (iii) fairness. In contrast to related work, a novel autonomous software agent exclusively uses local knowledge to generate energy demand plans for its vehicle that encode different battery charging regimes. Agents interact to learn and make collective decisions of which plan to execute so that power peaks and energy cost are reduced system-wide. Evaluation with real-world data confirms the improvement of drivers' comfort and fairness using the proposed planning method, while this improvement is assessed in terms of reliability and cost reduction under a varying number of participating vehicles. These findings have a significant relevance and impact for power utilities and system operator on designing more reliable and socially responsible Smart Grids with high penetration of electric vehicles.

Evangelos Pournaras, Srivatsan Yadhunathan, Ada Diaconescu

Structure plays a key role in learning performance. In centralized computational systems, hyperparameter optimization and regularization techniques such as dropout are computational means to enhance learning performance by adjusting the deep hierarchical structure. However, in decentralized deep learning by the Internet of Things, the structure is an actual network of autonomous interconnected devices such as smart phones that interact via complex network protocols. Self-adaptation of the learning structure is a challenge. Uncertainties such as network latency, node and link failures or even bottlenecks by limited processing capacity and energy availability can signif- icantly downgrade learning performance. Network self-organization and self-management is complex, while it requires additional computational and network resources that hinder the feasibility of decentralized deep learning. In contrast, this paper introduces a self-adaptive learning approach based on holarchic learning structures for exploring, mitigating and boosting learning performance in distributed environments with uncertainties. A large-scale performance analysis with 864000 experiments fed with synthetic and real-world data from smart grid and smart city pilot projects confirm the cost-effectiveness of holarchic structures for decentralized deep learning.