Daniel May

Daniel May, Matthew Taylor, Petr Musilek

As distributed energy resources (DERs) grow, the electricity grid faces increased net load variability at the grid edge, impacting operability and reliability. Transactive energy, facilitated through local energy markets, offers a decentralized, indirect demand response solution, with model-free control techniques, such as deep reinforcement learning (DRL), enabling automated, decentralized participation. However, existing studies largely overlook community-level net load variability, focusing instead on socioeconomic metrics. This study addresses this gap by using DRL agents to automate end-user participation in a local energy market (ALEX), where agents act independently to minimize individual energy bills. Results reveal a strong link between bill reduction and decreased net load variability, assessed across metrics such as ramping rate, load factor, and peak demand over various time horizons. Using a no-control baseline, DRL agents are benchmarked against a near-optimal dynamic programming approach. The dynamic programming benchmark achieves reductions of 22.05 percent, 83.92 percent, and 24.09 percent in daily import, export, and peak demand, respectively, while the DRL agents show comparable or superior results with reductions of 21.93 percent, 84.46 percent, and 27.02 percent. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of DRL in decentralized grid management, highlighting its scalability and near-optimal performance in reducing net load variability within community-driven energy markets.

Daniel May, Alessandro Tundo, Shashikant Ilager et al.

The deployment of ML models on edge devices is challenged by limited computational resources and energy availability. While split computing enables the decomposition of large neural networks (NNs) and allows partial computation on both edge and cloud devices, identifying the most suitable split layer and hardware configurations is a non-trivial task. This process is in fact hindered by the large configuration space, the non-linear dependencies between software and hardware parameters, the heterogeneous hardware and energy characteristics, and the dynamic workload conditions. To overcome this challenge, we propose DynaSplit, a two-phase framework that dynamically configures parameters across both software (i.e., split layer) and hardware (e.g., accelerator usage, CPU frequency). During the Offline Phase, we solve a multi-objective optimization problem with a meta-heuristic approach to discover optimal settings. During the Online Phase, a scheduling algorithm identifies the most suitable settings for an incoming inference request and configures the system accordingly. We evaluate DynaSplit using popular pre-trained NNs on a real-world testbed. Experimental results show a reduction in energy consumption up to 72% compared to cloud-only computation, while meeting ~90% of user request's latency threshold compared to baselines.

Elizaveta Kharlova, Daniel May, Petr Musilek

Rising penetration levels of (residential) photovoltaic (PV) power as distributed energy resource pose a number of challenges to the electricity infrastructure. High quality, general tools to provide accurate forecasts of power production are urgently needed. In this article, we propose a supervised deep learning model for end-to-end forecasting of PV power production. The proposed model is based on two seminal concepts that led to significant performance improvements of deep learning approaches in other sequence-related fields, but not yet in the area of time series prediction: the sequence to sequence architecture and attention mechanism as a context generator. The proposed model leverages numerical weather predictions and high-resolution historical measurements to forecast a binned probability distribution over the prognostic time intervals, rather than the expected values of the prognostic variable. This design offers significant performance improvements compared to common baseline approaches, such as fully connected neural networks and one-block long short-term memory architectures. Using normalized root mean square error based forecast skill score as a performance indicator, the proposed approach is compared to other models. The results show that the new design performs at or above the current state of the art of PV power forecasting.