Misaka: Interactive Swarm Testbed for Smart Grid Distributed Algorithm Test and Evaluation

In this paper, we present Misaka, a visualized swarm testbed for smart grid algorithm evaluation, also an extendable open-source open-hardware platform for developing tabletop tangible swarm interfaces. The platform consists of a collection of custom-designed 3 omni-directional wheels robots each 10 cm in diameter, high accuracy localization through a microdot pattern overlaid on top of the activity sheets, and a software framework for application development and control, while remaining affordable (per unit cost about 30 USD at the prototype stage). We illustrate the potential of tabletop swarm user interfaces through a set of smart grid algorithm application scenarios developed with Misaka.

Short-Term Electricity Price Forecasting based on Graph Convolution Network and Attention Mechanism

In electricity markets, locational marginal price (LMP) forecasting is particularly important for market participants in making reasonable bidding strategies, managing potential trading risks, and supporting efficient system planning and operation. Unlike existing methods that only consider LMPs' temporal features, this paper tailors a spectral graph convolutional network (GCN) to greatly improve the accuracy of short-term LMP forecasting. A three-branch network structure is then designed to match the structure of LMPs' compositions. Such kind of network can extract the spatial-temporal features of LMPs, and provide fast and high-quality predictions for all nodes simultaneously. The attention mechanism is also implemented to assign varying importance weights between different nodes and time slots. Case studies based on the IEEE-118 test system and real-world data from the PJM validate that the proposed model outperforms existing forecasting models in accuracy, and maintains a robust performance by avoiding extreme errors.