Search

Over the past few decades, there has been an ever-increasing penetration of Renewable Energy Generation in the power grid. However, unlike in the past, where fossil fuel generating plants are mostly located in remote areas, and in the proximity of the source of energy, the most common of the renewable generations, such as solar power systems, are haphazardly sited close to the loads because the source of energy, the sun, exists almost everywhere. This unplanned siting of renewable generating systems aggravates the power distribution lines congestion that already exists due to the power distribution deregulation. This paper presents a procedure that takes advantage of utilization and proper placement of Photovoltaic (PV) power systems to alleviate power line congestion. In this procedure, the base case load flow, without the solar generating system, is performed on the distribution network. And the bus with the lowest voltage is identified; this low voltage bus is indicative of congestion in the lines connecting the identified bus. A PV power system is then tied to that bus; the capacity of the PV generation is varied heuristically to determine the optimality that mitigates the congestion on the lines. The procedure is followed to test a 9-bus IEEE power system, and the results are presented.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing at a very fast pace and being increasingly adopted in many scenarios of industrial applications such as energy (smart grid), automobile (smart cars), healthcare (smart healthcare), manufacturing (smart manufacturing and supply chain) and other application such as homes (smart home) and cities (smart city). Nonetheless, these IoT technologies (devices, systems, protocols, and applications) are faced with many security-related issues. IoT Systems have different layers that are vulnerable to various kinds of attacks. To defend against these attacks, one must consider appropriate security approaches and mechanisms to ensure privacy, security, and trust within the various components and layers that make up the IoT system. Appropriate security mechanism is needed at every layer of an IoT system to keep them secure. Hence, finding suitable mechanism for each IoT layer is a necessity to keep IoT systems secure in the 21st-century applications and implementations. The paper first investigates the IoT layers and protocols, their vulnerability issues, and methods to resolve the issues from existing literatures. We then present a blockchain-based security architecture for the internet of things and practically investigated its security feature through implementation of various security mechanism. Analysis and discussion of the blockchain implementation results are carried for the purpose of meeting the security, privacy, and trust requirements of IoT.

The concept of smart cities has been gaining attention globally for the past decade. A smart city is one that makes a conscious effort to use smart technologies (such as IoT and CPS) to improve the quality of life of its residents. The Internet of cities is a global network of smart cities. Such a network has hundreds of member cities around the world that could benefit, improve the health of local populations, and collaborate in order to improve cost and energy efficiency of city operation. This paper presents a brief introduction to the Internet of cities.

The use of digital devices and systems such smart phones, computers, the Internet, and social media has resulted in a massive volume of data which is exponentially increasing daily. Such data is processed using multiple techniques, collectively known as big data analytics. Big data analytics is the process of examining large amounts of data (big data) to uncover hidden patterns, correlations, and other insights. Analyzing big data enables organizations and businesses to make better and faster decisions. This paper briefly presents the fundamental concepts of big data analytics and its tools.

The concept of IT Consumerization has received a lot of attention since the introduction of Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) management practice. It is using privately-owned ÌT resources such as devices or software for business purposes. It is a wave that no organization can afford to ignore. It seems unstoppable or inevitable because of the proliferation of tablets, laptops, smartphones, cloud storage, social tools, and mobile apps in the workplace. Using the same technologies for both work and private life comes at a price. This paper provides a brief introduction to IT consumerization.

Computational intelligence (CI) refers to recreating human-like intelligence in a computing machine. It consists of a set of computing systems with the ability to learn and deal with new situations such that the systems are perceived to have some attributes of intelligence. It is efficient in solving realworld problems which require reasoning and decision-making. It produces more robust, simpler, and tractable solutions than the traditional techniques. This paper provides a brief introduction to computational intelligence.

Stimulated Brillouin scattering(sBs) is the most dominant nonlinear process in optical fibers. It is a laser induced acousto-optic phenomenon with inherent optical feedback. As such, it is inherently quasi-periodic and chaotic in nature. The critical factors of fiber length, power, and feedback work together in producing this complex behavior. The Brillouin Fiber Ring greatly reduces the SBS linewidth as opposed to the open-ended scheme on the one hand, but enhances nonlinear dynamical instabilities such as quasi-periodicity and chaos. There is a rich variety of temporal behavior that flows through a seemingly automatic process of change above threshold. Increasing input power causes the dynamical behavior to further change while for some powers induces a change in line position or creates multiple lines in the frequency domain. The origin of these instabilities is being studied, while developing a means to suppress them.

Nonlinear fiber optics, in the form of stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS), has now emerged as the essential means for the construction of active optical devices used for all-optic in-line switching, channel selection, amplification, oscillation in optical communications, optical logic elements in optical computation and sensing, and a host of other applications. This paper attempts to present a survey and some of our own research findings on the nature of stimulated Brillouin scattering in single mode optical fibers and its device applications. In theory, the backscattering nature of the phenomenon enables its application as channel selectors and switches and filters in optical transmission and communications. We have been engaged in the design and implementation of fiber configurations, such as rings and loop mirrors, with the purpose of lowering the threshold. We report on experimental schemes involving Brillouin ring with amplifier-in-the ring, and Brillouin-NALMs (nonlinear amplifying loop mirrors). These successful devices are being studied for application as optical logic and neuron elements, Brillouin-NALMs for optical switching, and highly versatile sensors.

We have studied stimulated Brillouin scattering in single-mode optical fibers as a sensor for both temperature and strain. Shape Memory alloy Nitinol is also studied for enhancement of active sensing and control in structures. We have introduced the hybrid sBs amplifier/oscillator scheme, in which the short fiber amplifier performs sensing and the long oscillator fiber provides the required signal. The sensing fiber can be coated with SMA thin film for ruggedness, increased sBs sensitivity to temperature and strain, and memory or trainability. The oscillator/amplifier scheme also serves as a building block in the design of optical threshold logic circuits, optical computation, and more sophisticated sensing schemes. Such sensing schemes can be highly competitive with those based on fiber Bragg grating. The incorporation of SMA thin films provides memory capability to all these applications.