GA-based Congestion Management in Deregulated Power System using FACTS Devices || IEEE project

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Abstract--Congestion in the transmission lines is one of the technical problems that appear particularly in the deregulated environment. There are two types of congestion management methodologies to relieve it. One is non-cost free and the other is cost free methods. Among them later method relives the congestion technically whereas the former is related with the economics. In this dissertation congestion is relieved using cost free method. One of the cost free techniques is installing FACTS devices into the system. FACTS devices have a great flexibility that can control the active power, reactive power and voltage simultaneously. SVC and UPFC are two FACTS devices which can relieve the congestion in the transmission lines efficiently. As the FACTS devices are costly hence it is required to find the optimal location for FACTS devices. In congestion management, the objective function is nonlinear hence in solving this function Genetic Algorithm (GA) technique is used to obtain the global optimal solution. This method is tested on IEEE test bus system with FACTS devices and it can be extended to any practical system.

genetic algorithm flowchart

To relieve the congestion in the lines multiple multi-types off ACTS devices are located optimally using genetic algorithm. The following conclusions have been derived:

• With the above proposal it is possible for ISO to find global optimal schedule with the minimum total generation cost.

• In some transmission lines power flows with the OPF generation schedule are very high. Such extra power flow scan be reduced by installing FACTS devices.

• Line loading with SVC is less as compared with the line loading with UPFC.

• It has also been observed that proposed algorithm is also suitable for large systems with more number of FACTS devices, and the results so obtained are found to be encouraging.

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GPUs, Multicore Processors Drive Up Performance of Top Supercomputer

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• The latest version of the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers came out this week, and processing power continues to grow at a Moore’s Law pace.
• Japan’s K Computer maintained its No. 1 position on the latest list of the world’s Top500 supercomputers, which was published this week. K’s top spot was assured, thanks to an upgrade that makes it four times as powerful as its nearest competitor. Installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) in Kobe, Japan, the system has a peak benchmarked performance of 10.51 petaflops. This is the first system to ever reach the 10-petaflop range; 10 petaflops is 10 quadrillion calculations per second.
  The K Computer uses 705,024 SPARC64 processing cores, does not use graphics processors (as many of the systems on the Top500 list now do), and is one of the most energy-efficient systems on the list.
  
  
  Japan’s K Computer retained first place on the new Top500 list.
   Following the K Computer on the list are the Chinese Tianhe-1A system, with 2.57 petaflops performance, and the U.S. Cray XT5 system called Jaguar, installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, with a benchmarked performance of 1.75 petaflops. Incidentally, the Oak Ridge system is undergoing an upgrade that, once completed in 2013, could deliver 20 petaflops of processing power.
  The Top500 list has been published every six months since 1993. This current list is the 38th edition. Peak performance is measured by running a standard Linpack benchmark application.
  Although a single benchmark can never truly reflect how a system will run a particular application, the use of a common benchmark over the last 18 years allows for some analysis of high-performance computing trends when viewed in context of the entire list.
  One notable trend is that the top 10 supercomputers remain unchanged since June 2011. This is the first time the top performers maintained their ranking from one list to the next in its entire history.
  And although the top rankings did not change, the newest list does highlight a number of other developments. For example:
  1. China has increased its number of systems on the list to 75. It is now the clear No. 2 country in terms of high-performance computing (HPC), ahead of Japan, the U.K., France and Germany.
  2. The Chinese systems, at Nos. 2 and 4, and the Japanese Tsubame 2.0 system at No. 5, are all using Nvidia GPUs to accelerate computation.
  3. Thirty-nine systems use GPUs as accelerators (up from 17 six months ago); 35 of these use Nvidia chips, two use Cell processors, and two use ATI Radeon chips.
  4. Sixty-two percent of the systems use processors with six or more cores.
  5. Intel continues to provide the processors for the largest share (76.8 percent) of Top500 systems.
  With every list, the entry-level of performance just to claim the 500th spot increases. In the latest list, the barrier for entry moved up to 50.9 teraflops, compared with 39.1 teraflops six months ago. The last system on the newest list would have been ranked 305th in the previous list.
  Other points of interest include the following:
  1. A total of 384 systems (76.8 percent) are now using Intel processors. This is down slightly from six months ago (386 systems, 77.2 percent).
  2. Intel is now followed by the AMD Opteron family, with 63 systems (12.6 percent), down from 66.
  3. The share of IBM Power processors has stabilized for now with 49 systems (9.8 percent).
  4. Gigabit Ethernet is still the most-used internal system interconnect technology (223 systems, down from 230 systems), due to its widespread use at industrial customers, followed by InfiniBand technology with 213 systems, up from 208 systems.
  5. IBM kept its lead in systems and now has 223 systems (44.6 percent), compared to Hewlett-Packard with 140 systems (28.0 percent). 
  

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NEXI - Robot with facial expressions

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A latest invention by MIT Media Lab is a new robot that is able to show various facial expressions such as 'slanting its eyebrows in anger', or 'raise them in surprise', and show a wide assortment of facial expressions while communicating with people.

This latest achievement in the field of Robotics is named NEXI as it is framed as the next generation robots which is aimed for a range of applications for personal robots and human-robot teamwork.

DESIGNING

The head and face of NEXI were designed by Xitome Design which is a innovative designing and development company that specializes in robotic design and development. The expressive robotics started with a neck mechanism sporting 4 degrees of freedom (DoF) at the base, plus pan-tilt-yaw of the head itself. The mechanism has been constructed to time the movements so they mimic human speed. The face of NEXI has been specially designed to use gaze, eyebrows, eyelids and an articulate mandible which helps in expressing a wide range of different emotions.

The chassis of NEXI is also advanced. It has been developed by the Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics UMASS (University of Massachusetts), Amherst. This chassis is based on the uBot5 mobile manipulator. The mobile base can balance dynamically on two wheels. The arms of NEXI can pick up a weight of up to 10 pounds and the plastic covering of the chassis can detect any kind of human touch.

CYNTHIA BREAZEAL: HEAD OF THE PROJECT

This project was headed by Media Lab's Cynthia Breazeal, a well known robotics expert famous for earlier expressive robots such as Kismet. She is an Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT. She named her new product as an MDS (mobile, dextrous, social) robot.




FEATURES OF NEXI

Except a wide range of facial expressions, Nexi has many other features. It has self-balancing wheels like the Segway transporter, to ultimately ride on. Currently it uses an additional set of supportive wheels to operate as a statically stable platform in its early stage of development. It has hands which can be used to manipulate objects, eyes (video cameras), ears (an array of microphones), and a 3-D infrared camera and laser rangefinder which support real-time tracking of objects, people and voices as well as indoor navigation.

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Vulture - Unmanned Aircraft

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Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of United States is working to develop an unmanned aircraft that is able to stay in air for a period of 5 years at a time. It is one of the most recent inventions of world.

Officials of DARPA has revealed that this aircraft will be known as VULTURE due to its Persistent Pseudo-Satellite Capability . It means that this aircraft will be able to fly over a single area, communicating or performing analysis for years at a time.

Major Obstacles in Project:

Even this project looks appealing to many of you, but there are some serious problems or you can say obstacles in achieving this project.

1) First challenge in front of designers is to figure out some Way to Supply Power to this aircraft during long missions.

2) Another problem is that this aircraft will carry a 1000 pound (450 kg) payload in winds at an altitude of 60,000 to 90,000 feet.

3) Designers have also to sort out the problems regarding Deterioration of Materials during their long-time exposure to stratospheric flight.
In addition to this there may be many challenges during designing of this aircraft.

Daniel Newman: The Man Behind VULTURE

Daniel Newman is the Project Manger of this ambitious project of NASA. In his words: "We want to completely change the paradigm of how we think of aircraft. Aviation has a perfect record - we've never left one up there. We will attempt to break that record". It looks that its time to get out of the traditional "launch - recover - maintain - launch cycle of aircrafts."

Concept Behind Vulture:

Basically Aircrafts operates just like satellites, but the major difference is that these are not regulated by orbital mechanics. You can understand Vulture as a Pseudo-Satellite, which operates in the stratosphere and not in the low Earth orbit. This would provide a 65 dB upgrading in communications capability and will increase onboard sensor resolution.




When Will it Become a Reality?

Well, right now NASA has not mentioned any time table when the aircraft will be ready. But for now NASA has worked on the probable design of Vulture (see picture).

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Fourth Generation (4G)

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4G also called as Fourth-Generation Communications System, is a term used to describe the next step in wireless communications. A 4G system can provide a comprehensive IP solution where voice, data and streamed multimedia can be provided to users on an "Anytime, Anywhere" basis. The data transfer rates are also much higher than previous generations.

The main objectives of 4G are:

1)4G will be a fully IP-based integrated system.

2)This will be capable of providing 100 Mbit/s and 1 Gbit/s speeds both indoors and outdoors.

3)It can provide premium quality and high security.

4)4G offer all types of services at an affordable cost.

4G is developed to provide high quality of service (QoS) and rate requirements set by forthcoming applications such as wireless broadband access, Multimedia Messaging, Video Chat, Mobile TV, High definition TV content, DVB, minimal service like voice and data, and other streaming services.

4G technology allow high-quality smooth video transmission. It will enable fast downloading of full-length songs or music pieces in real time.

The business and popularity of 4Gmobiles is predicted to be very vast. On an average, by 2009, this 4Gmobile market will be over $400B and it will dominate the wireless communications, and its converged system will replace most conventional wireless infrastructure.

Data Rates For 4G:

The downloading speed for mobile Internet connections is from 9.6 kbit/s for 2G cellular at present. However, in actual use the data rates are usually slower, especially in crowded areas, or when there is congestion in network.

4G mobile data transmission rates are planned to be up to 20 megabits per second which means that it will be about 10-20 times faster than standard ASDL services.

In terms of connection seeds, 4G will be about 200 times faster than present 2G mobile data rates, and about 10 times faster than 3G broadband mobile. 3G data rates are currently 2Mbit/sec, which is very fast compared to 2G's 9.6Kbit/sec.

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