Search

High tech software solutions will form a fundamental part of the future electricity grid. Software enables real time efficient communication and control of various devices for producing and consuming electrical energy and will be instrumental in analyzing the complex scenarios that arise when multiple parties with varying goals interact to create a safe and stable delivery system for electricity. With the increasing adoption of renewable energy sources (RES), maintaining grid stability becomes increasingly challenging because legacy power infrastructure was often not designed with decentralized generation in mind. The varying nature of RES also further complicates maintaining a balance between electricity production and consumption. Flexibility is needed in both production and consumption in order to achieve the European union's 20-20-20 climate and energy targets while maintaining a safely balanced electricity grid. Demand-side management (DSM) programs attempt to harness consumption flexibility for goals that include maintaining grid stability when dealing with RES. Successfully implementing these programs requires producers, consumers and system operators to deal with strategic choice situations concerning various aspects of DSM. Literature often focuses on singular technical aspects of consumption flexibility while the combination of various technical and economical aspects determine the actual long term efficacy of DSM programs. This dissertation focuses on various techniques from computer science (CS) literature for studying strategic choice situations in various aspects of using DSM to address problems related to the integration of RES into contemporary electricity grids. In this dissertation the choice in compensation payment structures for flexibility providers are computationally analyzed using evolutionary game theory (EGT) with replicator dynamics to gain insight into how financial compensation influences DSM participation willingness. Computational analysis with heuristic payoff matrices determined through microsimulation shows that users of flexibility can gain a higher market share of flexibility providers by favoring reservation payment structures. Besides financial compensation, users of flexibility must decide which provider is best suited at any given time to activate their flexibility. To this end, algorithms for the coordination of the use of consumption flexibility and the negotiation between users and providers of this flexibility are implemented from multi-agent and mechanism design literature. Both cooperative contract net protocol (CNP) and competitive qualitative Vickrey auction (QVA) mechanisms are compared and evaluated in terms of allocation efficiency. To solve grid balancing problems effectively, sizable investments in technological solutions for managing and activating consumption flexibility are necessary. Whether these investments are cost effective depends on the costs and benefits associated with these technology investments. An investment cost model is proposed and evaluated for an optimized end to end solution for excess wind power production using various active network management (ANM) techniques including dynamic line rating (DLR), DSM and battery storage. In addition to investment decisions faced by users of flexibility, flexibility providers also must decide on which flexibility program to take part in. As a last contribution, participation in different competing business cases is simulated and computationally analyzed using EGT. The choice dynamics of flexibility providers choosing business partners, are evaluated in terms of how flexibility users employ and compensate for the consumption flexibility offered by flexibility providers. This evaluation also includes a sensitivity analysis on the influence that contractual activation constraints have on the efficiency of the DSM program in use. Applying techniques from EGT literature to analyze strategic choice scenarios has shown that EGT can offer valuable insights into the complex interactions that occur between the multitude of parties in the energy domain. status: published

We present the highlights of the now finished 4-year SCATE project. It was completed in February 2018 and funded by the Flemish Government IWT-SBO, project No. 130041.

In the emerging design landscape, knowledge integration and collaboration with external partners are being valued in the design process due to the increasing scale and complexity of the design problems. It becomes important for designers to be in close contact with stakeholders, such as the people, communities and organizations who are affecting, or being affected by, the problem or the solution from the early stages of the design process. The majority of the methods that are utilized in design practice have until now been user-focused, aiming at understanding the users and designing for the user experience. Stakeholder involvement in the design process is a new topic of study in the design field. Approaches and methods that guide the designers in developing design solutions by considering diverse stakeholder perspectives are limited. With the purpose of assisting the designers in considering the stakeholder perspec-tives in the design process, we present the Value Design Method that aims to inte-grate the user insights, business insights, and stakeholder expectations and roles at the early stages of the design process. We introduce the method alongside the Value Design Canvas. The Value Design Canvas is a visual probe that can be ap-plied in collaborative multi-stakeholder design workshops. We provide advice on how to apply the method and on aspects that should be attended to while organiz-ing multi-stakeholder workshops.

The role of design shifts from designing objects towards designing for experiences. The design profession has to follow this trend but the current skill-set of designers focuses mainly on objects; their form, function, manufacturing and interaction. However, contemporary methods and tools that support the designers’ creative efforts provide little help in addressing the subjective, context-dependent and temporal nature of experiences. Designers hence need to learn by trial and error how to place experiences at the center of their creative intentions. We are convinced that there is room for new tools and methods that can assist them in this process. In this chapter, we argue that storycraft can offer part of the guidance that designers require to put experiences before products right from the very start of the design process. First, we establish the background behind the shift from products to experiences and explain the challenges it poses for the designer’s creative process. Next we explore the contemporary conceptual design process to understand its shortcomings, point out the opportunity that storycraft offers and propose our approach to take on this challenge. Last but not least, we propose a specific method called Storyply that we have designed and developed iteratively by testing it in conceptual design workshops with students and professionals

Crowdsourcing can be defined as a task, which is usually performed by an employee, that is given out as an open call to a crowd of users to be completed. Although crowdsourcing has been growing in recent years, its application to design research and education has only scratched the surface of its potential. In this chapter we first introduce the different types of crowdsourcing. Then, following the typical design cycle we present examples from literature and cases from an educational setting of how crowdsourcing can support designers. Based on these examples we provide a list of tips for utilizing crowdsourcing for design and user research activities.

This chapter presents Cardboard modeling as a tool for design that allows for simultaneous exploration, experiencing, and communication of design proposals. It introduces basic techniques and exercises to build skill and speed in Cardboard modeling and then demonstrates how it can be used as a tool for exploration. It ends with presenting two Cardboard models that were made to give a sense of the fidelity level and type of design that is possible with the technique.

Contemporary creative design practice draws from the fields of product design and user-centered design, as boundaries between these two traditions become blurred as design thinking is embraced by industry and academia. By early design we mean design activities taking place with the formulation of an initial design challenge all the way through to the articulation of a design concept and leveling off as designers shift their attention towards more detailed considerations of form, function and interaction, refining the design concept and making the transition to development work. Novel methods applied to the early stages of design help adopt a wider societal and business perspective transcending considerations of products or systems, helping to design for latent needs and emerging user experiences. Intense collaboration with stakeholders from different organizations throughout the design process is often required and design teams tend to be distributed across organizations and geographical locations, which reinforce the need for tools that can support collaboration during the early design process.

One of the challenges for companies when developing concepts for new products, services or applications is whether or not the concepts will make sense to the user. And evidence that a concept will be valuable should preferably become available early in the design process. Involving users in the process of reflecting on new concepts makes sense because they are domain experts. However, in order to judge whether a concept will bring added value, users need to envision future contexts of use. We present the Co-Constructing Stories method, which aims to facilitate this envisioning process for users. In one-to-one sessions of less than an hour, first users are prompted by stories about the current context, helping them recollect relevant real life experiences for sensitization. Next, they are prompted through future scenarios to envision possible future experiences that may be enabled by the concept. In this paper we explain the method and discuss its background and relation to other methods. We introduce a case study in which the method was applied. Based on the insights gathered through this and similar case studies, we provide guidelines for designers who might be interested to use the method in the future.

This chapter discusses how to use video for prototyping interactivity during early phases of design. Advantages and limitations of video prototyping are discussed and related to other ways of representing early design concepts. The chapter traces the introduction and development of this method in the field of human computer interaction (HCI), moving on to discuss how video can help involve stakeholders in the design process and especially users. A range of techniques, methodological choices, and practical advice for future video prototype creators are discussed, and illustrated with examples.

Virtual environments (VE) are emerging for the creation of effective and motivating exercise therapy for neurorehabilitation of MS and stroke patients. Although these interactive systems are promising tools in rehabilitation, the targeted end users often suffer from visual system disorders and cognitive dysfunctions, which may influence their capabilities while navigating in a virtual 3D world. Cues like shades are proven to be effective navigation and localization aids in a 3D environment for healthy people, but little is known about their benefit for persons with a neurological disease. Therefore, we conducted a user study to test the impact of visual cues such as shading on navigation tasks in a VE for a population of MS and stroke patients. We compared 3 visual conditions in the environment: one without shading, one with shading, and one with shading as well as a dropline between the shade and the object representing the person's location in the environment. Participants in the user study were 11 persons diagnosed with MS, 9 with stroke and 9 healthy control persons. Subjective measures were not uninfluenced by the use of shade or a dropline, but objective measures show a significant increase in speed, and lower execution time resulting from the addition of object-shading.

This paper aims at demonstrating that the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) approach to transformation is suitable to cope with the abstraction gap between the specification of application rules for context-aware applications and the implementation of these rules using rule engines. This paper reports on the transformation of Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules onto rules that can be executed by the Jess rules engine. We have applied the MDA approach to define this transformation, by specifying it in terms of mappings between elements of the ECA Domain-specific Language (ECA-DL), which is the language we developed to represent ECA rules, and the Jess metamodel. The transformation was fully specified, implemented using the Atlas Transformation Language (ATL) and tested with a simple example.