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Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology is emerging as an innovative paradigm for improving the electricity grid in terms of stabilization and demand response, through the integration of electric vehicles (EVs). A cornerstone in this field is the estimation of the aggregated available capacity (AAC) of EVs based on available data such as origin–destination mobility data, traffic and time of day. This paper considers a real case study, consisting of two aggregation points, identified in the city of Padua (Italy). As a result, this study presents a new method to identify potential applications of V2G by analyzing floating car data (FCD), which allows planners to infer the available AAC obtained from private vehicles. Specifically, the proposed method takes advantage of the opportunity provided by FCD to find private car users who may be interested in participating in V2G schemes, as telematics and location-based applications allow vehicles to be continuously tracked in time and space. Linear and nonlinear dynamic models with different input variables were developed to analyze their relevance for the estimation in one-step- and multiple-step-ahead prediction. The best results were obtained by using traffic data as exogenous input and nonlinear dynamic models implemented by multilayer perceptrons and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. Both structures achieved an R2 of 0.95 and 0.87 for the three-step-ahead AAC prediction in the two hubs considered, compared to the values of 0.88 and 0.72 obtained with the linear autoregressive model. In addition, the transferability of the obtained models from one aggregation point to another was analyzed to address the problem of data scarcity in these applications. In this case, the LSTM showed the best performance when the fine-tuning strategy was considered, achieving an R2 of 0.80 and 0.89 for the two hubs considered.

The integration of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology into smart energy management systems represents a significant advancement in the field of energy suppliers for Industry 4.0. V2G systems enable a bidirectional flow of energy between electric vehicles and the power grid and can provide ancillary services to the grid, such as peak shaving, load balancing, and emergency power supply during power outages, grid faults, or periods of high demand. In this context, reliable prediction of the availability of V2G as an energy source in the grid is fundamental in order to optimize both grid stability and economic returns. This requires both an accurate modeling framework that includes the integration and pre-processing of readily accessible data and a prediction phase over different time horizons for the provision of different time-scale ancillary services. In this research, we propose and compare two data-driven predictive modeling approaches to demonstrate their suitability for dealing with quasi-periodic time series, including those dealing with mobility data, meteorological and calendrical information, and renewable energy generation. These approaches utilize publicly available vehicle tracking data within the floating car data paradigm, information about meteorological conditions, and fuzzy weekend and holiday information to predict the available aggregate capacity with high precision over different time horizons. Two data-driven predictive modeling approaches are then applied to the selected data, and the performance is compared. The first approach is Hankel dynamic mode decomposition with control (HDMDc), a linear state-space representation technique, and the second is long short-term memory (LSTM), a deep learning method based on recurrent nonlinear neural networks. In particular, HDMDc performs well on predictions up to a time horizon of 4 h, demonstrating its effectiveness in capturing global dynamics over an entire year of data, including weekends, holidays, and different meteorological conditions. This capability, along with its state-space representation, enables the extraction of relationships among exogenous inputs and target variables. Consequently, HDMDc is applicable to V2G integration in complex environments such as smart grids, which include various energy suppliers, renewable energy sources, buildings, and mobility data.

This article provides a comparative analysis of two common control configurations used to control the side-stream distillation used to separate benzene, toluene and xylene as suggested by Doukas and Lyben. Their under-actuated model has been considered as the model of distillation column and the internal model controller is designed considering a Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and Virtual Inputs (VI) techniques. An internal controller design based on VI is proposed in this article for this kind of underactuated systems. This design is used to control in parallel the distillation process and its model in real time. The proposed controller design is simple and systematic in relation with the desired closed loop specifications of the internal model control structure. Furthermore, the controller obtained ensure robustness to process variations. The SVD technique can realize the decoupling of under-actuated processes and wipe out unrealizable factors by introducing compensation terms, affecting the dynamic of the system. The aim of this article is to make a comparison between our proposed VI controller and the SVD approach. The results we obtained confirmed the potentials of the proposed controller based on VI considering the set point tracking and its robustness.

Rotating machines such as induction motors are crucial parts of most industrial systems. The prognostic health management of induction motor rotors plays an essential role in increasing electrical machine reliability and safety, especially in critical industrial sectors. This paper presents a new approach for rotating machine fault prognosis under broken rotor bar failure, which involves the modeling of the failure mechanism, the health indicator construction, and the remaining useful life prediction. This approach combines signal processing techniques, inherent metrics, and principal component analysis to monitor the induction motor. Time- and frequency-domains features allowing for tracking the degradation trend of motor critical components that are extracted from torque, stator current, and speed signals. The most meaningful features are selected using inherent metrics, while two health indicators representing the degradation process of the broken rotor bar are constructed by applying the principal component analysis. The estimation of the remaining useful life is then obtained using the degradation model. The performance of the prediction results is evaluated using several criteria of prediction accuracy. A set of synthetic data collected from a degraded Simulink model of the rotor through simulations is used to validate the proposed approach. Experimental results show that using the developed prognostic methodology is a powerful strategy to improve the prognostic of induction motor degradation.

Soft Sensors (SSs) are inferential dynamical models employed in industries to perform prediction of process hard-to-measure variables based on their relation with easily accessible ones. They allow implementation of real-time control and monitoring of the plants and present other advantages in terms of costs and efforts. Given the complexity of industrial processes, these models are generally designed with data-driven black-box machine learning (ML) techniques. ML methods work well only if the data on which the prediction is performed share the same distribution with the one on which the model was trained. This is not always possible, since plants can often show new working conditions. Even similar plants show different data distributions, making SSs not scalable between them. Models should then be created from scratch with highly time-consuming procedures. Transfer Learning (TL) is a field of ML that re-uses the knowledge from one task to learn a new different, but related, one. TL techniques are mainly used for classification tasks. Only recently TL techniques have been adopted in the SS field. The proposed survey reports the state of the art of TL techniques for nonlinear dynamical SSs design. Methods and applications are discussed and the new directions of this research field are depicted.

The knowledge of the electrochemical processes inside a Fuel Cell (FC) is useful for improving FC diagnostics, and Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) is one of the most used techniques for electrochemical characterization. This paper aims to propose the identification of a Fractional-Order Transfer Function (FOTF) able to represent the FC behavior in a set of working points. The model was identified by using a data-driven approach. Experimental data were obtained testing a Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) to measure the cell impedance. A genetic algorithm was firstly used to determine the sets of fractional-order impedance model parameters that best fit the input data in each analyzed working point. Then, a method was proposed to select a single set of parameters, which can represent the system behavior in all the considered working conditions. The comparison with an equivalent circuit model taken from the literature is reported, showing the advantages of the proposed approach.

The design and application of Soft Sensors (SSs) in the process industry is a growing research field, which needs to mediate problems of model accuracy with data availability and computational complexity. Black-box machine learning (ML) methods are often used as an efficient tool to implement SSs. Many efforts are, however, required to properly select input variables, model class, model order and the needed hyperparameters. The aim of this work was to investigate the possibility to transfer the knowledge acquired in the design of a SS for a given process to a similar one. This has been approached as a transfer learning problem from a source to a target domain. The implementation of a transfer learning procedure allows to considerably reduce the computational time dedicated to the SS design procedure, leaving out many of the required phases. Two transfer learning methods have been proposed, evaluating their suitability to design SSs based on nonlinear dynamical models. Recurrent neural structures have been used to implement the SSs. In detail, recurrent neural networks and long short-term memory architectures have been compared in regard to their transferability. An industrial case of study has been considered, to evaluate the performance of the proposed procedures and the best compromise between SS performance and computational effort in transferring the model. The problem of labeled data scarcity in the target domain has been also discussed. The obtained results demonstrate the suitability of the proposed transfer learning methods in the design of nonlinear dynamical models for industrial systems.

The introduction of new topologies and training procedures to deep neural networks has solicited a renewed interest in the field of neural computation. The use of deep structures has significantly improved the state of the art in many applications, such as computer vision, speech and text processing, medical applications, and IoT (Internet of Things). The probability of a successful outcome from a neural network is linked to selection of an appropriate network architecture and training algorithm. Accordingly, much of the recent research on neural networks is devoted to the study and proposal of novel architectures, including solutions tailored to specific problems. The papers of this Special Issue make significant contributions to the above-mentioned fields by merging theoretical aspects and relevant applications. Twelve papers are collected in the issue, addressing many relevant aspects of the topic.

Soft Sensors (SSs) are inferential models used in many industrial fields. They allow for real-time estimation of hard-to-measure variables as a function of available data obtained from online sensors. SSs are generally built using industries historical databases through data-driven approaches. A critical issue in SS design concerns the selection of input variables, among those available in a candidate dataset. In the case of industrial processes, candidate inputs can reach great numbers, making the design computationally demanding and leading to poorly performing models. An input selection procedure is then necessary. Most used input selection approaches for SS design are addressed in this work and classified with their benefits and drawbacks to guide the designer through this step.

In this paper, classical and non-integer model order reduction methodologies are compared. Non integer order calculus has been used to generalize many classical control strategies. The property of compressing information in modelling systems, distributed in time and space, and the capability of describing long-term memory effects in dynamical systems are two features suggesting also the application of fractional calculus in model order reduction. In the paper, an open loop balanced realization is compared with three approaches based on a non-integer representation of the reduced system. Several case studies are considered and compared. The results confirm the capability of fractional order systems to capture and compress the dynamics of high order systems.

This paper proposes a model of the dynamics of credit contagion through non-performing loans on financial networks. Credit risk contagion is modeled in the context of the classical SIS (Susceptibles-Infected-Susceptibles) epidemic processes on networks but with a fundamental novelty. In fact, we assume the presence of two different classes of infected agents, and then we differentiate the dynamics of assets subject to idiosyncratic risk from those affected by systemic risk by adopting a SIIS (Susceptible-Infected1-Infected2-Susceptible) model. In the recent literature in this field, the effect of systemic credit risk on the performance of the financial network is a hot topic. We perform numerical simulations intended to explore the roles played by two different network structures on the long-term behavior of assets affected by systemic risk in order to analyze the effect of the topology of the underlying network structure on the spreading of systemic risk on the structure. Random graphs, i.e., the Erdös−Rényi model, are considered “benchmark” network structures while core-periphery structures are often indicated in the literature as idealized structures, although they are able to capture interesting, specific features of real-world financial networks. Moreover, as a matter of comparison, we also perform numerical experiments on small-world networks.