Jurica Babic

An Analysis of Power Trading Agent Competition 2014

This paper provides insights into performance of competing agents in Power Trading Agent Competition finals held in May 2014. Firstly, the paper gives the description of the Power TAC post-game data set and presents our analysis process. Furthermore, paper discusses the analysis output: indicators about brokers performance in energy retail market, energy wholesale market as well as the balancing process. Results of the analysis identified diverse approaches in the design of competing agents strategies.

Prototype-driven software development process for augmentative and alternative communication applications

The paper presents software development model for implementation of communication and education applications based on Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC). Target user group of these applications are people with disabilities, specifically people with complex communication needs. Development process of such applications should follow specific principles to successfully implement all functional and accessible features that applications should contain in order to be accessible and highly usable. Furthermore, development process should be enriched with specific methodologies and approaches in its particular phases in order to fully exploit a necessary synergy of multidisciplinary team consisting of experts from information and communication technology, rehabilitation and education, psychology and graphic design. The presented model was defined during extensive developmental activities over two years period and evaluated on the number of publicly available case-study web and mobile AAC applications.

Electricity Trading Agent for EV-enabled Parking Lots

The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is seen as an important step towards environmental sustainability. Perhaps not surprising, many governments all around the world are providing incentives for consumers to buy electric vehicles (EVs). A positive response from consumers means that the demand for the charging infrastructure increases as well. We investigate how an existing traditional parking lot, upgraded with chargers, can suit the present demand for charging stations. In particular, a resulting EV-enabled parking lot is an electricity trading agent (i.e., broker) which acts as an energy retailer and as a player on a target electricity market. In this paper, we use agent-based simulation to present the EV-enabled parking lot ecosystem in order to model the underlying dynamics and uncertainties regarding parking lots with electricity trading agent functionalities. We instantiate our agent-based simulations using real-life data in order to perform the what-if analysis. Several key performance indicators (KPIs), including parking utilization, charging utilization and electricity utilization, are proposed. We also illustrate how those KPIs can be used to choose the effective investment strategy with respect to the number and speed of chargers.

Evaluating Policies for Parking Lots Handling Electric Vehicles

The recent advent of electric vehicles (EVs) marks the beginning of a new positive era in the transportation sector. Although the environmental benefits of EVs are well-known today, planning and managing EV charging infrastructure are activities that are still not well-understood. In this paper, we are investigating how the so-called EV-enabled parking lot, a parking lot that is equipped with a certain number of chargers, can define an appropriate parking policy in such a way that satisfies two challenges: EV owners’ needs for recharging as well as the parking lot operator’s goal of profit maximization. Concretely, we present three parking policies that are able to simultaneously deal with both EVs and internal combustion engine vehicles. Detailed sensitivity analysis, based on real-world data and simulations, evaluates the proposed parking policies in a case study concerning parking lots in Melbourne, Australia. This paper produces results that are highly prescriptive in nature because they inform a decision maker under which circumstances a certain parking policy operates optimally. Most notably, we find that the dynamic parking policy, which takes the advantage of advanced information technology (IT) and charging infrastructure by dynamically changing the role of parking spots with chargers, often outperforms the other two parking policies, because it maximizes the profit and minimizes the chance of cars being rejected by the parking lot. We also discuss how making a few parking spots EV-exclusive might be a good policy when the number of available chargers is small and/or the required IT infrastructure is not in place for using the dynamic policy. We conclude this paper proposing a technology roadmap for transforming parking lots into smart EV-enabled parking lots based on the three studied parking policies.