The potential of carbon emission regulations applied to an individual building will encourage building owners to purchase utility-provided green power or to employ onsite renewable energy generation. As both cases are based on intermittent renewable energy sources, demand side control is a fundamental precondition for maximizing the effectiveness of using renewable energy sources. Such control leads to a reduction in peak demand and/or in energy demand variability, therefore, such reduction in the demand profile eventually enhances the efficiency of an erratic supply of renewable energy. The combined operation of active thermal energy storage and passive building thermal mass has shown substantial improvement in demand-side control performance when compared to current state-of-the-art demand-side control measures. Specifically, "model-based" optimal control for this operation has the potential to significantly increase performance and bring economic advantages. However, due to the uncertainty in certain operating conditions in the field its control effectiveness could be diminished and/or seriously damaged, which results in poor performance. This dissertation pursues improvements of current demand-side controls under uncertainty by proposing a robust supervisory demand-side control strategy that is designed to be immune from uncertainty and perform consistently under uncertain conditions. Uniqueness and superiority of the proposed robust demand-side controls are found as below: a. It is developed based on fundamental studies about uncertainty and a systematic approach to uncertainty analysis. b. It reduces variability of performance under varied conditions, and thus avoids the worst case scenario. c. It is reactive in cases of critical "discrepancies" observed caused by the unpredictable uncertainty that typically scenario uncertainty imposes, and thus it increases control efficiency. This is obtainable by means of i) multi-source composition of weather forecasts including both historical archive and online sources and ii) adaptive Multiple model-based controls (MMC) to mitigate detrimental impacts of varying scenario uncertainties. The proposed robust demand-side control strategy verifies its outstanding demand-side control performance in varied and non-indigenous conditions compared to the existing control strategies including deterministic optimal controls. This result reemphasizes importance of the demand-side control for a building in the global carbon economy. It also demonstrates a capability of risk management of the proposed robust demand-side controls in highly uncertain situations, which eventually attains the maximum benefit in both theoretical and practical perspectives.

This dissertation presents innovative demand management techniques for service systems with limited resources. The first study analyzes demand management policies of animal shelters with limited Kennel space as a set of interacting stochastic queueing systems. In practice, there are two main policies being used, which we call "Kill" and "No-Kill" policies. In a "Kill" system, animals may be euthanized if a shelter is full. Many shelters have moved to a "No-Kill" policy, where they avoid killing for space and adopt other approaches to reduce supply and demand mismatch. Our goal is to provide insights on how No-Kill policies, such as coordination, adoption and neutering campaigns, help reduce the animals' killing rate so that the shelter management can choose the way to effectively solve their problems. In the second part, we consider a topic of demand management for the Sports and Entertainment (S&E) industry, called "Scaling the house", i.e., how to divide seats into zones for different prices to maximize revenue across the venue. From the data obtained from several performance venues in the U.S., we find ticket demand is impacted by locations of seats as well as by price. We characterize closed-form solutions for the optimal two-dimensional zoning decision (with row and column cuts) and the one-dimensional decision (with row cuts), and explore when each model should be applied. The third study considers pricing as a tool to manage demand for the S&E tickets. We develop dynamic pricing with demand learning models where demand is also affected by time left until the show dates. Since the show's popularity is usually uncertain to the seller, we propose a method to learn the overall popularity via Bayesian updates. We perform computational experiments to understand properties of the model solutions and identify when demand learning is most beneficial.

M. Tech. Civil Engineering / South Africa is categorized as a water stressed country and it is forecasted to experience physical water scarcity by the year 2025 with a yearly water availability of less than 1000m3 per capita. Continuous pollution of the available water resources from the sources, and the high population growth and its attributes will increase pressure on the available resources and probably resulting in increased conflicts over allocations and more stress resulting in water scarcity. The overall aim of the study was to develop tools and strategies for Water Demand Management in Mabopane, Garankuwa and Winterveldt, which are the areas supplied by Sandspruit Works Association.

published_or_final_version / Public Administration / Master / Master of Social Sciences

The ability for domestic consumers to provide demand response to dynamic electricity pricing will become increasingly valuable for integrating the high penetrations of renewables that are expected to be connected to electricity networks in the future. The aim of this thesis is to investigate whether domestic consumers will be willing and able to provide demand response in such low-carbon futures. A broad approach is presented in this thesis, with research contributions on subjects including data privacy, behavioural economics, and battery modelling. The principle argument of the thesis is that studying the behaviour of consumers with grid-connected photovoltaic ('PV') systems can provide insight into how consumers might respond to dynamic pricing in future low-carbon power systems, as both experience irregular electricity prices that are correlated with intermittent renewable generation. Through a combination of statistical and qualitative methods, this thesis investigates the demand response behaviour of consumers with PV systems in the UK. The results demonstrate that these consumers exhibit demand response behaviour by increasing demand during the day and decreasing demand during the evening. Furthermore, this effect is more pronounced on days with higher irradiance. The results are novel in three ways. First, they provide quantified evidence that suggests that domestic consumers with PV systems engage in demand response behaviour. Second, they provide evidence of domestic consumers responding to irregular electricity prices that are correlated with intermittent renewable generation, thereby addressing the aim of this thesis, and supporting the assumption that consumers can be expected to respond to dynamic pricing in future markets with high penetrations of renewables. Third, they provide evidence of domestic consumers responding to dynamic pricing that is similar to real-time pricing, while prior evidence of this is rare and confined to the USA.

No description available.

Although the airline industry has drastically changed since its deregulation in 1978, publically available sources of data have remained nearly the same. In the U.S., most researchers and decision-makers rely on government data that contains highly aggregated price information (e.g., average quarterly prices). However, aggregate data can hide important market behavior. With the emergence of online distribution channels, there is a new opportunity to model air travel demand using detailed price information. This dissertation uses online prices and seat maps to build a dataset of daily prices and bookings at the flight-level. Several research contributions are made, all related to leveraging online data to better understand airline pricing and product strategies, and how these strategies impact customers, as well as the industry in general. One major contribution is the finding that the recent product debundling trend in the U.S. airline industry has diluted revenues to the U.S. Airport and Airways Trust Fund by at least five percent. Additionally, several new behavioral insights are found for one debundling trend that has been widely adopted by U.S. airlines: seat reservation fees. Customers are found to be between 2 and 3.3 times more likely to purchase premium coach seats (with extra legroom and early boarding privileges) when there are no regular coach window or aisle seats that can be reserved for free, suggesting that the ability of airlines to charge seat fees is strongly tied to load factors. Model results are used to explore optimal seat fees and find that an optimal static fee could increase revenues by 8 percent, whereas optimal dynamic fees could increase revenues by 10.2 percent. Another major contribution is in modeling daily bookings and estimating price elasticities using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression without correcting for price endogeneity and two-stage least squares (2SLS) regression, which corrects for endogeneity. Results highlight the importance of correcting for price endogeneity (which is not often done in air travel applications). In particular, models that do not correct for endogeneity find inelastic demand estimates whereas models that do correct for endogeneity find elastic demand estimates. This is important, as pricing recommendations differ for inelastic and elastic models. A set of instrumental variables are found to pass validity tests and can be used to correct for price endogeneity in future models of daily flight-level demand.

The paper is concerned with the impact of market research prior to integration, on the structures of noncompetitive industries in integrated economy. The analysis focuses on separated, single commodity, monopolistic markets with stochastic demand. Monopolistic firms are considered in dynamic multiperiod model, where intertemporal links are determined by expenditures on market research in a present period and benefits from this activity (i.e., smaller variance of the prediction error) in the future. Assuming that each firm maximizes its total discounted expected utility from profit in indefinite time, we show that the optimal market research strategy is stationary and depends on market size. Consequently, in the period following integration firms operating prior to integration in small markets (such as Slovenia, Czech Republic, Hungary or Estonia) are expected to have much less information about the integrated market than their competitors operating before integration on European market. This informational asymmetry may affect the structure of the industry in integrated economy. In the extreme case, the firm operating before integration in the small market can be ruled out from the integrated market. (authors' abstract)

Electricity production from renewable energy resources such as wind energy and photovoltaics is variable. Integration of these intermittent resources into the electricity system leads to new challenges in how to manage imbalance between supply and demand on the grid. One way to meet these challenges is to develop so-called smart grid solutions. One idea, called demand response, is to adjust the amount or timing of energy consumption, e.g. by control of household appliances, to provide flexibility that could be used to balance the grid. In aggregate, when applied to many units across the system, large volumes of energy could be made available when needed and this grid flexibility can be used as a product on the electricity regulation market. Despite the potential benefits, the number of demand response bids is currently low. The aim of this thesis is to identify barriers in the Swedish regulation market, and togive Sweden's transmission system operator, Svenska kraftnät, recommendations on how to facilitate implementations of the technique. This has been done throughliterature studies and a wide range of interviews with people within the electricity market sector. The results indicate that a combination of several elements in the complex energy system impede the introduction of demand response. The main issues are related to market regulations and profitability difficulties. The authors recommend that Svenska kraftnät lowers the minimum bid size in all of the Swedish bidding areas, and adjusts the balance responsibility agreement and the system of balancing settlement.

Syfte: Vi vill ta reda på hur teknikutvecklingen relaterad till VoD påverkar beteendet hos unga vuxna och hur detta beteende förändrar tv-tittandet i denna målgrupp. Teori: Denna studie använder huvudsakligen två teorier för att undersöka problemet. Den första teori som tas upp är Diffusion of innovation, Rogers (2003) som diskuterar innovationers spridning och påverkan i samhället. För att vidare undersöka beteendet hos unga vuxna används Jakob Bjurs avhandling Transforming Audiences (2009) som undersöker individualiseringens mönster inom tv-tittande. Metod: En kvalitativ empirisk fallstudie baserad på intervjuer av fokusgrupper samt personintervju. Detta stöds av en kvantitativ undersökning i syfte att skapa en triangulering för att minimera risken för en felaktig tolkning av resultatet. Resultat: Unga vuxna vill inte längre anpassa sig till tv-tablåer. Generationen blir allt mer individualiserad och vill därför välja helt på egen hand var och när de skall titta på exempelvis ett tv-program. Medieföretagen är medvetna om detta skifte från linjär-tv till VoD och således finns ett fokus på att utveckla ett mer individ-anpassat tittande. Trots individualiseringen och de förbättrade VoD-tjänsterna vill många se bland annat nyheter, större sportevenemang samt melodifestivalen via linjär-tv. Slutsats: Den största anledningen till att många gör denna övergång från linjär-tv till VoD är att de söker en flexibilitet som linjär-tv inte kan erbjuda. Flexibiliteten har gjorts möjlig genom den teknikutveckling som skett inom datorer, smarttelefoner och surfplattor. Det som lockar många VoD-användare till att fortfarande titta på linjär-tv är de sändningar som är viktiga att se i realtid. Tack vare dessa kommer förmodligen tv-tittandet finnas kvar en tid framöver, dock ser vi sjunkande tittarsiffror i de yngre generationerna vilket gör framtiden för linjär-tv oviss.