Browsing by Issue Date, starting with "2022-11-25"
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- PROCSIM: an energy community simulator to develop and evaluate load balancing schemesPublication . Velosa, Nuno Alexandre Silva; Quintal, Filipe Magno Gouveia; Pereira, Amâncio Lucas de SousaClimate change is one of the biggest challenges of the present millennium. The energy sector is the biggest contributor to this problem with approximately 25% of the global emissions. In order to mitigate this problem, one of the main solutions concerns to the use of energy from renewable sources. It is important to begin taking better advantage of the renewable resources more effectively and more often. In this sense, it is very important to develop mechanisms to balance the demand and supply, with the goal of minimizing, as much as possible, the use of energy from non renewable sources. For this reason, Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) started to emerge. They allow the sharing of the resources, contributing to a better management of them. However, these are not problem free. There are two main challenges that need to be solved: avoid a bad management of the renewable resources, hence avoiding the need to acquire energy from outside the community, and guarantee a fair distribution of the resources. In this regard, many researchers are focusing their attentions in load shifting approaches (adapt the appliances running time to better balance the load). Nevertheless, most of them use implicit approaches through the use of incentives (such as tariffs and dynamic pricing), which can be considered unfair approaches since richer people tend to benefit (which is not supposed, because ideally all community members should benefit the same). Based on this, in this work it is suggested an explicit load shifting approach based on the distribution of the timeslots, using the Multiple Knapsack combinatorial optimization problem. Although there are some literature which demonstrate the applicability of Knapsack in a variety of real world problems, the same does not happen in the energy field. Furthermore, since a large quantity of data is required to test and evaluate multiple scenarios in this load balancing scheme, and taking in consideration that only two energy community datasets were found on the literature, in this thesis it is also proposed an energy community simulator that allows to create different Energy Community (EC) datasets and evaluate the impact of the optimization, considering only Photovoltaics (PV) production (other types of renewable sources as well as batteries are not considered). Finally, in order to evaluate the impact of the developed load balancing strategy, the developed sim ulator was used in three different experiments: variation in bin size, variation in community size and variation in flexibility. The results were positive and showed that this strategy can provide a better man agement of the PV resources once it increased the PV use, decreased the PV waste and also decreased the use of energy from the grid.
- TerraSenseTK: a toolkit for remote soil nutrient estimationPublication . Pereira, Manuel Afonso Soares; Quintal, Filipe Magno Gouveia; Pereira, Amâncio Lucas de SousaIntensive farming endangers soil quality in various ways. Researchers show that if these practices continue, humanity will be faced with food production issues. For this matter, Earth Observation, more concretely Soil Sensing, along with Machine Learning, can be employed to monitor several indicators of soil degradation, such as soil salinity, soil heavy metal contamination and soil nutrients estimation. More concretely, Soil Nutrients are of great importance. For instance, to understand which crop better suits the land, the soil nutrients must be identified. However, sampling soil is a laborous and expensive task, which can be leveraged by Remote Sensing and Machine Learning. Several studies have already been developed in this matter, although many gaps still exist. Among them, the lack of cross-dataset evaluations of existing algorithms, and also the steep learning curve to the Earth Observation domain that prevents many researchers from embracing this field. In this sense, we propose TerraSense ToolKit (TSTK), a python toolkit that addresses these challenges. In this work, the possibility to use Remote sensing along with Machine Learning algorithms to per form Soil Nutrient Estimation is explored, additionally, a nutrient estimation toolkit is proposed, and the effectivity of it is tested in a soil nutrient estimation case study. This toolkit is capable of simplifying Remote Sensing experiments and aims at reducing the barrier to entry to the field of Earth Observation. It comes with a preconfigured case study which implements a soil sensing pipeline. To evaluate the usability of the toolkit, experiments with five different crops were executed, namely with Wheat, Barley, Maize, Sunflower and Vineyards. This case study gave visibility to an underlying unbalanced data problem, which is not well addressed in the current State of the Art.
- Aplicações de um carácter no espaço interior: estudar o impacto na perceção visualPublication . Freitas, José Roberto Pão; Chakraborty, ShujoyObjetivo: Este trabalho consiste em explorar quais os componentes que se destacam num espaço ocupável, e redesenhá-los de forma a comunicar um tema para os seus ocupantes. Esta dissertação argumenta que definir um tema espacial coerente, promove uma boa definição do espaço e apresenta uma experiência positiva ao público alvo. Contexto: O snack-bar da Universidade da Madeira, será o espaço elegido como molde para a realização de estudos e para maquetização digital 3D. Desse modo, será aprofundado dois caracteres aplicáveis no local: industrial e contemporâneo. Através de um processo de investigação, foram identificados cinco componentes do espaço, responsáveis pela representação do tema de espaço: 1) piso; 2) teto; 3) fenestrações; 4) móveis; 5) iluminação. Pressupõe-se que a definição do local pode ser alterada, através da manipulação dos 5 componentes mencionados acima. Abordagem: Este projeto contextualiza-se como um processo aplicável de investigação e experimentação do espaço selecionado. O desenvolvimento do projeto será elaborado através de casos de estudo, estudos de circulação dos utilizadores, reconhecimento e análise das funções do espaço, desenvolvimento sistemático, aplicação da cor e materiais, e renderização 3D. Produção: Este projeto será abordado através do seu desenvolvimento, subdividido em tópicos, criando assim uma sequência de trabalho. Sendo necessário passar por abordagens práticas perante o desenvolvimento da investigação, fazendo com que cada tópico estivesse em constante transformação. A investigação será apresentado na forma de relatório, dando conta de várias etapas, tal como: 1) pesquisa e recolha de informação; 2) caso de estudo; 3) esboço conceptual; 4) modelagem digital; 5) renderização; Resultado: A elaboração e exposição dos caracteres industrial e contemporâneo, serão evidenciados através da manipulação dos 5 componentes mencionados no contexto. O resultado final, será demonstrado através de um conceito digital desenvolvido em maquetes 3D de alta qualidade, em que serão expostos a transformação do espaço utilizando ambos os temas.
- Anonymous Panda: preserving anonymity and expressiveness in online mental health platformsPublication . Freitas, Érica da Silva; Campos, Pedro Filipe Pereira; Lopes, Laís dos SantosDigital solutions that allow people to seek treatment, such as online psychological interventions and other technology-mediated therapies, have been developed to assist individuals with mental health disorders. Such approaches may raise privacy concerns about the use of people’s data and the safety of their mental health information. This work uses cutting-edge computer graphics technology to develop a novel system capable of increasing anonymity while maintaining expressiveness in computer-mediated mental health interventions. According to our preliminary findings, we were able to customize a realistic avatar using Live Link, Metahumans, and Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) with the same emotional depth as a real person. Furthermore, these findings showed that the virtual avatars’ inability to express themselves through hand motion gave the impression that they were acting in an unnatural way. By including the hand tracking feature using the Leap Motion Controller, we were able to improve our comprehension of the prospective use of ultra-realistic virtual human avatars in video conferencing therapy, i.e., both studies helped us understand how vital facial and body expressions are and how problematic their absence is in communicating with others.