arXiv subjects

Victor O. K. Li

Publications and source records attributed to Victor O. K. Li.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

Vehicular Energy Network

The smart grid spawns many innovative ideas, but many of them cannot be easily integrated into the existing power system due to power system constraints, such as the lack of capacity to transport renewable energy in remote areas to the urban centers. An energy delivery system can be built upon the traffic network and electric vehicles (EVs) utilized as energy carriers to transport energy over a large geographical region. A generalized architecture called the vehicular energy network (VEN) is constructed and a mathematically tractable framework is developed. Dynamic wireless (dis)charging allows electric energy, as an energy packet, to be added and subtracted from EV batteries seamlessly. With proper routing, energy can be transported from the sources to destinations through EVs along appropriate vehicular routes. This paper gives a preliminary study of VEN. Models are developed to study its operational and economic feasibilities with real traffic data in the United Kingdom. Our study shows that a substantial amount of renewable energy can be transported from some remote wind farms to London under some reasonable settings and VEN is likely to be profitable in the near future. VEN can complement the power network and enhance its power delivery capability.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2016

Incorporating Copying Mechanism in Sequence-to-Sequence Learning

We address an important problem in sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) learning referred to as copying, in which certain segments in the input sequence are selectively replicated in the output sequence. A similar phenomenon is observable in human language communication. For example, humans tend to repeat entity names or even long phrases in conversation. The challenge with regard to copying in Seq2Seq is that new machinery is needed to decide when to perform the operation. In this paper, we incorporate copying into neural network-based Seq2Seq learning and propose a new model called CopyNet with encoder-decoder structure. CopyNet can nicely integrate the regular way of word generation in the decoder with the new copying mechanism which can choose sub-sequences in the input sequence and put them at proper places in the output sequence. Our empirical study on both synthetic data sets and real world data sets demonstrates the efficacy of CopyNet. For example, CopyNet can outperform regular RNN-based model with remarkable margins on text summarization tasks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2015

A Revisit of Infinite Population Models for Evolutionary Algorithms on Continuous Optimization Problems

Infinite population models are important tools for studying population dynamics of evolutionary algorithms. They describe how the distributions of populations change between consecutive generations. In general, infinite population models are derived from Markov chains by exploiting symmetries between individuals in the population and analyzing the limit as the population size goes to infinity. In this paper, we study the theoretical foundations of infinite population models of evolutionary algorithms on continuous optimization problems. First, we show that the convergence proofs in a widely cited study were in fact problematic and incomplete. We further show that the modeling assumption of exchangeability of individuals cannot yield the transition equation. Then, in order to analyze infinite population models, we build an analytical framework based on convergence in distribution of random elements which take values in the metric space of infinite sequences. The framework is concise and mathematically rigorous. It also provides an infrastructure for studying the convergence of the stacking of operators and of iterating the algorithm which previous studies failed to address. Finally, we use the framework to prove the convergence of infinite population models for the mutation operator and the $k$-ary recombination operator. We show that these operators can provide accurate predictions for real population dynamics as the population size goes to infinity, provided that the initial population is identically and independently distributed.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2015

A Social Spider Algorithm for Solving the Non-convex Economic Load Dispatch Problem

Economic Load Dispatch (ELD) is one of the essential components in power system control and operation. Although conventional ELD formulation can be solved using mathematical programming techniques, modern power system introduces new models of the power units which are non-convex, non-differentiable, and sometimes non-continuous. In order to solve such non-convex ELD problems, in this paper we propose a new approach based on the Social Spider Algorithm (SSA). The classical SSA is modified and enhanced to adapt to the unique characteristics of ELD problems, e.g., valve-point effects, multi-fuel operations, prohibited operating zones, and line losses. To demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach, five widely-adopted test systems are employed and the simulation results are compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms. In addition, the parameter sensitivity is illustrated by a series of simulations. The simulation results show that SSA can solve ELD problems effectively and efficiently.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2015

Parameter Sensitivity Analysis of Social Spider Algorithm

Social Spider Algorithm (SSA) is a recently proposed general-purpose real-parameter metaheuristic designed to solve global numerical optimization problems. This work systematically benchmarks SSA on a suite of 11 functions with different control parameters. We conduct parameter sensitivity analysis of SSA using advanced non-parametric statistical tests to generate statistically significant conclusion on the best performing parameter settings. The conclusion can be adopted in future work to reduce the effort in parameter tuning. In addition, we perform a success rate test to reveal the impact of the control parameters on the convergence speed of the algorithm.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2015

Adaptive Chemical Reaction Optimization for Global Numerical Optimization

A newly proposed chemical-reaction-inspired metaheurisic, Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO), has been applied to many optimization problems in both discrete and continuous domains. To alleviate the effort in tuning parameters, this paper reduces the number of optimization parameters in canonical CRO and develops an adaptive scheme to evolve them. Our proposed Adaptive CRO (ACRO) adapts better to different optimization problems. We perform simulations with ACRO on a widely-used benchmark of continuous problems. The simulation results show that ACRO has superior performance over canonical CRO.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2015

Efficient Learning for Undirected Topic Models

Replicated Softmax model, a well-known undirected topic model, is powerful in extracting semantic representations of documents. Traditional learning strategies such as Contrastive Divergence are very inefficient. This paper provides a novel estimator to speed up the learning based on Noise Contrastive Estimate, extended for documents of variant lengths and weighted inputs. Experiments on two benchmarks show that the new estimator achieves great learning efficiency and high accuracy on document retrieval and classification.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2015

Capacity Estimation for Vehicle-to-Grid Frequency Regulation Services with Smart Charging Mechanism

Due to various green initiatives, renewable energy will be massively incorporated into the future smart grid. However, the intermittency of the renewables may result in power imbalance, thus adversely affecting the stability of a power system. Frequency regulation may be used to maintain the power balance at all times. As electric vehicles (EVs) become popular, they may be connected to the grid to form a vehicle-to-grid (V2G) system. An aggregation of EVs can be coordinated to provide frequency regulation services. However, V2G is a dynamic system where the participating EVs come and go independently. Thus it is not easy to estimate the regulation capacities for V2G. In a preliminary study, we modeled an aggregation of EVs with a queueing network, whose structure allows us to estimate the capacities for regulation-up and regulation-down, separately. The estimated capacities from the V2G system can be used for establishing a regulation contract between an aggregator and the grid operator, and facilitating a new business model for V2G. In this paper, we extend our previous development by designing a smart charging mechanism which can adapt to given characteristics of the EVs and make the performance of the actual system follow the analytical model.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2015

Renewable Powered Cellular Networks: Energy Field Modeling and Network Coverage

Powering radio access networks using renewables, such as wind and solar power, promises dramatic reduction in the network operation cost and the network carbon footprints. However, the spatial variation of the energy field can lead to fluctuations in power supplied to the network and thereby affects its coverage. This warrants research on quantifying the aforementioned negative effect and countermeasure techniques, motivating the current work. First, a novel energy field model is presented, in which fixed maximum energy intensity $γ$ occurs at Poisson distributed locations, called energy centers. The intensities fall off from the centers following an exponential decay function of squared distance and the energy intensity at an arbitrary location is given by the decayed intensity from the nearest energy center. The product between the energy center density and the exponential rate of the decay function, denoted as $ψ$, is shown to determine the energy field distribution. Next, the paper considers a cellular downlink network powered by harvesting energy from the energy field and analyzes its network coverage. For the case of harvesters deployed at the same sites as base stations (BSs), as $γ$ increases, the mobile outage probability is shown to scale as $(c γ^{-πψ}+p)$, where $p$ is the outage probability corresponding to a flat energy field and $c$ a constant. Subsequently, a simple scheme is proposed for counteracting the energy randomness by spatial averaging. Specifically, distributed harvesters are deployed in clusters and the generated energy from the same cluster is aggregated and then redistributed to BSs. As the cluster size increases, the power supplied to each BS is shown to converge to a constant proportional to the number of harvesters per BS.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2015

A Social Spider Algorithm for Global Optimization

The growing complexity of real-world problems has motivated computer scientists to search for efficient problem-solving methods. Metaheuristics based on evolutionary computation and swarm intelligence are outstanding examples of nature-inspired solution techniques. Inspired by the social spiders, we propose a novel Social Spider Algorithm to solve global optimization problems. This algorithm is mainly based on the foraging strategy of social spiders, utilizing the vibrations on the spider web to determine the positions of preys. Different from the previously proposed swarm intelligence algorithms, we introduce a new social animal foraging strategy model to solve optimization problems. In addition, we perform preliminary parameter sensitivity analysis for our proposed algorithm, developing guidelines for choosing the parameter values. The Social Spider Algorithm is evaluated by a series of widely-used benchmark functions, and our proposed algorithm has superior performance compared with other state-of-the-art metaheuristics.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2015

Evolutionary Artificial Neural Network Based on Chemical Reaction Optimization

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are very popular tools to design and evolve artificial neural networks (ANNs), especially to train them. These methods have advantages over the conventional backpropagation (BP) method because of their low computational requirement when searching in a large solution space. In this paper, we employ Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO), a newly developed global optimization method, to replace BP in training neural networks. CRO is a population-based metaheuristics mimicking the transition of molecules and their interactions in a chemical reaction. Simulation results show that CRO outperforms many EA strategies commonly used to train neural networks.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2015

Real-Coded Chemical Reaction Optimization with Different Perturbation Functions

Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO) is a powerful metaheuristic which mimics the interactions of molecules in chemical reactions to search for the global optimum. The perturbation function greatly influences the performance of CRO on solving different continuous problems. In this paper, we study four different probability distributions, namely, the Gaussian distribution, the Cauchy distribution, the exponential distribution, and a modified Rayleigh distribution, for the perturbation function of CRO. Different distributions have different impacts on the solutions. The distributions are tested by a set of well-known benchmark functions and simulation results show that problems with different characteristics have different preference on the distribution function. Our study gives guidelines to design CRO for different types of optimization problems.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2015

Sensor Deployment for Air Pollution Monitoring Using Public Transportation System

Air pollution monitoring is a very popular research topic and many monitoring systems have been developed. In this paper, we formulate the Bus Sensor Deployment Problem (BSDP) to select the bus routes on which sensors are deployed, and we use Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO) to solve BSDP. CRO is a recently proposed metaheuristic designed to solve a wide range of optimization problems. Using the real world data, namely Hong Kong Island bus route data, we perform a series of simulations and the results show that CRO is capable of solving this optimization problem efficiently.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2015

Optimal V2G Scheduling of Electric Vehicles and Unit Commitment using Chemical Reaction Optimization

An electric vehicle (EV) may be used as energy storage which allows the bi-directional electricity flow between the vehicle's battery and the electric power grid. In order to flatten the load profile of the electricity system, EV scheduling has become a hot research topic in recent years. In this paper, we propose a new formulation of the joint scheduling of EV and Unit Commitment (UC), called EVUC. Our formulation considers the characteristics of EVs while optimizing the system total running cost. We employ Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO), a general-purpose optimization algorithm to solve this problem and the simulation results on a widely used set of instances indicate that CRO can effectively optimize this problem.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2015

Chemical Reaction Optimization for the Set Covering Problem

The set covering problem (SCP) is one of the representative combinatorial optimization problems, having many practical applications. This paper investigates the development of an algorithm to solve SCP by employing chemical reaction optimization (CRO), a general-purpose metaheuristic. It is tested on a wide range of benchmark instances of SCP. The simulation results indicate that this algorithm gives outstanding performance compared with other heuristics and metaheuristics in solving SCP.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2015

An Inter-molecular Adaptive Collision Scheme for Chemical Reaction Optimization

Optimization techniques are frequently applied in science and engineering research and development. Evolutionary algorithms, as a kind of general-purpose metaheuristic, have been shown to be very effective in solving a wide range of optimization problems. A recently proposed chemical-reaction-inspired metaheuristic, Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO), has been applied to solve many global optimization problems. However, the functionality of the inter-molecular ineffective collision operator in the canonical CRO design overlaps that of the on-wall ineffective collision operator, which can potential impair the overall performance. In this paper we propose a new inter-molecular ineffective collision operator for CRO for global optimization. To fully utilize our newly proposed operator, we also design a scheme to adapt the algorithm to optimization problems with different search space characteristics. We analyze the performance of our proposed algorithm with a number of widely used benchmark functions. The simulation results indicate that the new algorithm has superior performance over the canonical CRO.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2015

Base Station Switching Problem for Green Cellular Networks with Social Spider Algorithm

With the recent explosion in mobile data, the energy consumption and carbon footprint of the mobile communications industry is rapidly increasing. It is critical to develop more energy-efficient systems in order to reduce the potential harmful effects to the environment. One potential strategy is to switch off some of the under-utilized base stations during off-peak hours. In this paper, we propose a binary Social Spider Algorithm to give guidelines for selecting base stations to switch off. In our implementation, we use a penalty function to formulate the problem and manage to bypass the large number of constraints in the original optimization problem. We adopt several randomly generated cellular networks for simulation and the results indicate that our algorithm can generate superior performance.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2015

Phase Identification in Distribution Networks with Micro-Synchrophasors

This paper proposes a novel phase identification method for distribution networks where phases can be severely unbalanced and insufficiently labeled. The analysis approach draws on data from high-precision phasor measurement units (micro-synchrophasors or uPMUs) for distribution systems. A key fact is that time-series voltage phasors taken from a distribution network show specific patterns regarding connected phases at measurement points. The algorithm is based on analyzing crosscorrelations over voltage magnitudes along with phase angle differences on two candidate phases to be matched. If two measurement points are on the same phase, large positive voltage magnitude correlations and small voltage angle differences should be observed. The algorithm is initially validated using the IEEE 13-bus model, and subsequently with actual uPMU measurements on a 12-kV feeder.

eess.SY↗