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In recent years, there has been a significant focus on advancing the next generation of power systems. Despite these efforts, persistent challenges revolve around addressing the operational impact of uncertainty on predicted data, especially concerning economic dispatch and optimal power flow. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a stochastic day-ahead scheduling approach for a community. This method involves iterative improvements in economic dispatch and optimal power flow, aiming to minimize operational costs by incorporating quantile forecasting. Then, we present a real-time market and payment problem to handle optimization in real-time decision-making and payment calculation. We assess the effectiveness of our proposed method against benchmark results and conduct a test using data from 50 real households to demonstrate its practicality. Furthermore, we compare our method with existing studies in the field across two different seasons of the year. In the summer season, our method decreases optimality gap by 60% compared to the baseline, and in the winter season, it reduces optimality gap by 67%. Moreover, our proposed method mitigates the congestion of distribution network by 16.7\% within a day caused by uncertain energy, which is a crucial aspect for implementing energy markets in the real world.

Liquid crystal elastomer (LCE) has been intensively utilized in 4D printing techniques to fabricate smart structures with reversible actuation on the basis of appropriate alignment of liquid crystal (LC) molecules. As a non-contact alignment strategy with a controllability of orientation, magnetic-field alignment has been rarely adapted in 4D printing of LCE because of its poor printing efficiency and demand on large field strength. Here, we report a digital light projection (DLP) system integrated with reorientable magnetic field to facilely print smart LCE structures. We propose a new LCE precursor solution that maintains a liquid crystalline nematic phase and an adequate flowability at room temperature. The resin prior to photopolymerization can be sufficiently aligned by a magnetic field with a strength of 500 mT in seconds without temperature elevating or cycling. Consequential printed structures are capable of presenting an impressive reversible thermal actuation of more than 30 %. The local and arbitrary magnetic-field alignment in layers during DLP printing is characterized, which renders us the ability to construct smart structures with more delicate LC alignments. Furthermore, we introduce the selective deformation of LCE structures with programmed molecular orientation using the photo-thermal effect. Our reported approach reveals the significant potential for fabricating morphing structures in various fields, including soft robotics, biomedical structures, and microelectronics. ({\dag}These authors contributed equally.)

Peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity markets enable prosumers to minimize their costs, which has been extensively studied in recent research. However, there are several challenges with P2P trading when physical network constraints are also included. Moreover, most studies use fixed prices for grid power prices without considering dynamic grid pricing, and equity for all participants. This policy may negatively affect the long-term development of the market if prosumers with low demand are not treated fairly. An initial step towards addressing these problems is the design of a new decentralized P2P electricity market with two dynamic grid pricing schemes that are determined by consumer demand. Futhermore, we consider a decentralized system with physical constraints for optimizing power flow in networks without compromising privacy. We propose a dynamic congestion price to effectively address congestion and then prove the convergence and global optimality of the proposed method. Our experiments show that P2P energy trade decreases generation cost of main grid by 56.9% compared with previous works. Consumers reduce grid trading by 57.3% while the social welfare of consumers is barely affected by the increase of grid price.

Conventional solvers are often computationally expensive for constrained optimization, particularly in large-scale and time-critical problems. While this leads to a growing interest in using neural networks (NNs) as fast optimal solution approximators, incorporating the constraints with NNs is challenging. In this regard, we propose deep Lagrange dual with equality embedding (DeepLDE), a framework that learns to find an optimal solution without using labels. To ensure feasible solutions, we embed equality constraints into the NNs and train the NNs using the primal-dual method to impose inequality constraints. Furthermore, we prove the convergence of DeepLDE and show that the primal-dual learning method alone cannot ensure equality constraints without the help of equality embedding. Simulation results on convex, non-convex, and AC optimal power flow (AC-OPF) problems show that the proposed DeepLDE achieves the smallest optimality gap among all the NN-based approaches while always ensuring feasible solutions. Furthermore, the computation time of the proposed method is about 5 to 250 times faster than DC3 and the conventional solvers in solving constrained convex, non-convex optimization, and/or AC-OPF., Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures

Minimizing the inclusive Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is challenging since its gradient is defined as an integral over the posterior. Recently, multiple methods have been proposed to run SGD with biased gradient estimates obtained from a Markov chain. This paper provides the first non-asymptotic convergence analysis of these methods by establishing their mixing rate and gradient variance. To do this, we demonstrate that these methods-which we collectively refer to as Markov chain score ascent (MCSA) methods-can be cast as special cases of the Markov chain gradient descent framework. Furthermore, by leveraging this new understanding, we develop a novel MCSA scheme, parallel MCSA (pMCSA), that achieves a tighter bound on the gradient variance. We demonstrate that this improved theoretical result translates to superior empirical performance., Comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2022