Sharif Digital Repository

Nowadays, variable generation and renewable energy resources are increasingly penetrating the energy systems to supply the users' demand at the distribution grid. Variable Energy Resources (VER) can provide energy at a lower cost, and they also guarantee cleaner energy. Still, the uncertainty and variability from these resources' output can affect the net-load of the system at each hour. Besides, the issue of energy balance has always been a challenge for the energy distribution networks. A comprehensive way to unravel this problem is to use flexible resources. One of the crucial issues in the flexibility debate is meeting this need by different energy resources. It is always an issue for... 

The power systems’ net-load variability and uncertainty would aggravate significantly as the penetration of Renewable Energy Resources (RERs) in power systems increases. In response, power system researchers have introduced a new concept, namely flexibility, to quantitatively and systematically deal with unavoidable features of RERs. In power distribution systems as the connection point of power systems with customers, there are many opportunities for improving the flexibility level of systems. Nowadays, the emergence of prosumers has created new opportunities for distribution system operators in providing the system with different services of flexibility in distribution systems. Therefore,... 

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are widely used as a promising machine learning method in different applications and come with intensive computation and storage requirements. In recent years, several pieces of prior work have proposed different accelerators to improve DNNs processing. We observe that although the state-of-the-art DNN accelerators effectively process some network layers of certain shapes, they fail to keep computation resources fully utilized for many other layers. The reason is twofold: first, the mapping algorithm is unable to employ all compute cores for processing some layer types and dimension sizes, and second, the hardware cannot perform data distribution and aggregation... 

Power distribution systems are experiencing restructuring owning to the increasing trend of integrating renewable energy sources as well as privatization in the network. In this regard, the dependence of power generation by renewable energy sources on meteorological characteristics would challenge the conventional procedures of operating the system. Respectively, while the expansion of renewable energy sources would facilitate supplying the demand loads locally; the issues associated with the uncertainty and variability of power generation by these units should be addressed in future operational schemes of distribution systems. This condition has resulted in the development of the... 

Personalized advertising has grown drastically as new tracking technologies allow advertisers to monitor consumers’ online behavior and distribute advertisements accordingly, which has given rise to privacy concerns. The present study investigates the role of personality traits and data source in social media behavioral advertising’s value perception. Two online studies were conducted to examine how plasticity (shared variance of openness and extraversion) and data source (first party vs third-party) affect consumers’ privacy calculus and purchase intention respectively. The participants, all active social media users from the United States, were hired from Prolific.co. For the first study,... 

Humans need the five senses to understand and interact constructively with their surrounding environment; in the world of robots and intelligent systems, this is achieved using sensors. In the modern world, tactile sensors based on triboelectric effect play a prominent role in important application areas such as health monitoring, human-computer interaction, robotics, pressure mapping, and electronic signature. Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) are one type of energy harvesting systems that convert mechanical energy into electrical energy. In these sensors, due to the contact and touch with the triboelectric material, an electric charge is generated and induced into the electrode, then... 

Increasing variability and uncertainty in modern power systems may affect the systems’ reliable operation. This means higher needs for flexibility provision in power systems to meet the net load variability and uncertainty. Distributed energy resources (DERs) dispersed in distribution networks have noticeable flexibility capabilities which can provide required flexibility of distribution network while they can help the transmission network to acquire the flexibility requirements if appropriately aggregated and coordinated. This thesis presents a market-based hierarchical framework for exploiting DERs’ flexibility provision to meet intra-hourly variability and uncertainty of net loads in...