Intelligent methods for load forecasting

Load forecasting is an important task in the management of a power utility. The most recent developments in forecasting involve the use of artificial intelligence techniques, which offer powerful modelling capabilities. This paper discusses these techniques and provides a review of their application to load forecasting.

Recent developments in intelligent control

Intelligent control, as a discipline, has certainly been one of main growth areas in the field of control systems over the last 5-10 years. Although the topic is relatively new in itself, a number of other research areas, some of them well established, have effectively been swallowed up under the overall intelligent control umbrella. This paper defines intelligent control and identifies the main sub-areas in which significant progress has been made and likely fruitful topics to pursue in the future.

The death of Osama bin Laden - the end of Al-Qaeda's Pan-Islamic ambition?

This paper evaluates the implications of Osama bin Ladin’s death for the future of al-Qaeda’s global jihad. It critically examines the debate as to the make-up of the group and identifies bin Ladin’s primary role as chief ideologue advocating a defensive jihad to liberate the umma. The rationale and appeal of bin Ladin’s message and Muslims’ reaction to both his statements and al-Qaeda’s increasing use of sectarian violence are assessed in the context of Pan-Islam as political ideology. The paper concludes that while the ideal of Islamic unity and the sentiment of Muslim solidarity are unlikely to vanish, al-Qaeda’s violent jihad has not only failed to achieve these goals but has worked against it, thereby confining it to the political margins.

A normative approach to multi-agent systems for intelligent buildings

Building Management Systems (BMS) are widely adopted in modern buildings around the world in order to provide high-quality building services, and reduce the running cost of the building. However, most BMS are functionality-oriented and do not consider user personalization. The aim of this research is to capture and represent building management rules using organizational semiotics methods. We implement Semantic Analysis, which determines semantic units in building management and their relationship patterns of behaviour, and Norm Analysis, which extracts and specifies the norms that establish how and when these management actions occur. Finally, we propose a multi-agent framework for norm based building management. This framework contributes to the design domain of intelligent building management system by defining a set of behaviour patterns, and the norms that govern the real-time behaviour in a building.