Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
Today, the growth of population, the cities expansion, and the continuous quest for economic growth worldwide have brought a set of new problems associated with the increasing use and depletion of resources. Society faces fundamental challenges reaching a sustainable energy supply, which should ensure a clean and affordable energy provision. Therefore, the consumers' behavior and their willingness to actively participate in the energy market will have a fundamental role in attaining a sustainable future. Solutions to mitigate global climate change should be grounded in a rigorous understanding of energy demand, particularly the factors that drive energy demand. This research is aimed to evaluate consumers' willingness to participate in demand-side management (DSM). For this purpose, agent-based modeling (ABM) was used. Data on DSM acceptance and consumers' flexibility was available based on a survey conducted in Portugal including the socio-economic characterization of the respondents and the assessment of their willingness to participate in DSM programs. According to this methodology, the consumer is defined as an agent. For consumer agents, effective factors were defined and assessed. In this paper, simulation was run with NetLogo software, and the result showed the importance of the agents' social network on their willingness to participate.

Abstract
Renewable energy sources such as solar and wind are now competitive with traditional fossil and nuclear power when generating but that is just the challenge. When not generating can be a problem for grid integration and the main challenge to the widespread acceptance and dissemination of solar and wind, and the focus of research for the next generation of energy engineers. Intermittent, the adjective most associated with solar and wind energy has been and continues to be the focus of research by power engineers, AI professionals, and system scientists from the late 20th century and is the critical factor in the design of the future power grids, The most obvious solution is energy storage but then the choice of the storage method and size are complex problems. Will best solutions involve pumped hydro, Li-Ion batteries, or hydrogen generation? Or will next-generation ultra-capacitors, or high-speed flywheels gyros, or some yet to be discovered device will be the dominating technologies? The primary objective of the storage designs will be based on what's best for the reliability and efficiency of the grid, and simultaneously optimizing cost and environmental impact functions. Socio-economic and geopolitical considerations must also be considered to satisfy local or regional constraints. There is also the question of purpose: will it be sized for grid stability, or medium, or long-term storage. This factor will depend on the specific grid requirements. The focus of this paper is to study multi-source renewable energy systems that include storage called HRES or Hybrid Renewable Energy with Storage. This study describes the development of a behind-the-meter Energy Management System (EMS) for an HRES, under the assumption that Real-Time Pricing (RTP) is offered by a utility supplying power to a medium-size office complex. A cost function to be minimized is introduced to optimize the contribution of each energy source. Also, this work develops the basis of a platform for decision-makers to evaluate the viability of the optimized system in conjunction with the financial feasibility analysis.

Abstract

Abstract
The prevalence and availability of cloud infrastructures has made them the de facto solution for storing and archiving data, both for organizations and individual users. Nonetheless, the cloud's wide spread adoption is still hindered by dependability and security concerns, particularly in applications with large data collections where efficient search and retrieval services are also major requirements. This leads to an increased tension between security, efficiency, and search expressiveness. In this article we tackle this tension by proposing BISEN, a new provably-secure boolean searchable symmetric encryption scheme that improves these three complementary dimensions by exploring the design space of isolation guarantees offered by novel commodity hardware such as Intel SGX, abstracted as Isolated Execution Environments (IEEs). BISEN is the first scheme to support multiple users and enable highly expressive and arbitrarily complex boolean queries, with minimal information leakage regarding performed queries and accessed data, and verifiability regarding fully malicious adversaries. Furthermore, BISEN extends the traditional SSE model to support filter functions on search results based on generic metadata created by the users. Experimental validation and comparison with the state of art shows that BISEN provides better performance with enriched search semantics and security properties.