No abstract

Elaborating demand side management strategies is crucial for integrating electricity from renewable sources into the electrical grid. Though future demand side will largely depend on an automatic control of larger loads, it is also widely agreed upon that consumer behavior will play an important role as well -be it by purchasing respective automation techniques or by shifting the use of appliances to other times of the day. Doing so, it becomes possible to select households that offer sufficient load shifting potential, and to overcome undirected and thus, expensive campaigns. To our knowledge, this perspective is still under-researched, especially when it comes to clustering methods on load consumption data with a focus on peak detection accuracy to provide customer segmentation.Using the data collected in the Irish CER dataset, which contains readings for more than 4000 residential customers over a period of 18 months at 30-minute intervals, we show that the whole clustering of the time series, with a few adaptations on the usage of the K-Means algorithm, provides better clustering results without sacrificing practical feasibility. Characteristic load profiles allow us to segment the customers, address groups of households with similar consumption patterns and determine on the fly the cluster membership of a given load curve. This will support decision making regarding the investments in load shifting campaigns to prevent over or under-dimensioning linked to peak energy demand.

Quality information acquisition and disclosure have significant ramifications for supply chain members. This study investigates the interaction between a manufacturer’s product quality information acquisition and different product quality information disclosure systems in a supply chain wherein the manufacturer can privately acquire the precise quality information of its product by affordable means initially. We consider two different quality information disclosure systems for the quality information acquisition: voluntary disclosure (i.e., the manufacturer determines whether to disclose the quality information that he has acquired), and mandatory disclosure (i.e., the manufacturer is mandated to disclose the quality information that he has acquired). We examine the effects of voluntary disclosure and mandatory disclosure on the equilibrium strategies and payoffs of the manufacturer and the retailer and on the consumer surplus. It is shown that mandatory disclosure significantly reduces the manufacturer’s incentive to acquire the precise product quality information and leads to a reduction in the product quality information that the retailer and the consumers can receive. Interestingly, although the manufacturer is ex ante better off, the retailer’s ex ante payoff and the expected consumer surplus become lower under mandatory disclosure, as opposed to voluntary disclosure of product quality information.

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