What is it about?

Power conservation is an important task that prevent outages throughout the world. We show that our human-centered approach involves humans just enough to boost their participation while providing the flexibility to set default options and participate only when desired, so as to prevent decision fatigue and burnout.

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Why is it important?

Short-term and long-term blackouts during extreme weather events can have a dramatic impact on human lives. Previous psychological studies showed that users need just the right amount of incentive and participation in order to be actively engaged without experiencing decision fatigue. By placing the human in the center of our framework, we show that a wide majority of users would want to participate in such system in exchange of financial rewards. For this reason, we let users participate with default options that can be automatically activated even when the user is not home, that are personalized to their own comfort, and that can always be overridden if the user has different needs in a particular situation.

Perspectives

Designing algorithms that explicitly consider the role of the human is challenging but certainly needed in our digital era. It is clear that interdisciplinary approaches like ours are needed as we move forward and create solutions that are not just flashy but have actual long-term benefit for our society. Despite the complexity of the design and operation of power grids, I hope our work can be inspiring to implement solutions for the smart grids of the future with the human in mind, starting with microgrids.

Enrico Casella
University of Wisconsin Madison

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: A Human-Centered Power Conservation Framework based on Reverse Auction Theory and Machine Learning, ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems, April 2024, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3656348.
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