Regardless of the form of restructuring, deregulated electricity industries share one common feature: the absence of any significant, rapid demand-side response to the wholesale (or, spot market) price. For a variety of reasons, electricity industries continue to charge most consumers an average cost based on regulated retail tariff from the era of vertical integration, even as the retailers th...

This paper describes an adaptive system called VL-PATSy, an extension to an existing system (PATSy) that adds a mechanism for serving vicarious learning (VL) resources. Vicarious learning is the notion that people can and will learn through being given access to the learning experiences of others. The VL resources represent an innovative form of learner support for a complex cognitive task (cli...

Cloud computing environment provisions the supply of computing resources on the basis of demand, as and when needed. It builds upon advances of virtualisation and distributed computing to support cost efficient usage of computing resources, emphasizing on resource scalability and on-demand services. It allows business outcomes to scale up and down their resources based on needs. Managing the cu...

As a consequence of an increasing share of renewable energies, balancing electricity production and delivery requires efficient electricity markets. At the heart of electricity markets are Information Systems (IS) that coordinate demand and supply in real-time. IS has recently opened up an alternative towards increasing the efficiency of electricity markets by managing demand side resources; i....

Disasters can cause many casualties and considerable destruction mainly because of ineffective preventive measures, incomplete preparedness, and weak relief logistics systems. After catastrophic events happen, quick and effective response is of great importance, so as to having an efficient logistic plan for distributing needed relief commodities efficiently and fairly among affected people. In...

The restructured electric power industry has brought new challenges and concerns for the secured operation of stressed power systems. As renewable energy resources, distributed generation, and demand response become significant portions of overall generation resource mix, smarter or more intelligent system dispatch technology is needed to cope with new categories of uncertainty associated with ...

Demand response and distributed generation are key components of power systems. Several challenges are raised at both technical and business model levels for integration of those resources in smart grids and microgrids. The implementation of a distribution network as a test bed can be difficult and not cost-effective; using computational modeling is not sufficient for producing realistic result...