How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. In The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi provide an inside look at how Japanese companies go about creating this new knowledge organizationally. The authors point out that there are two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge, contained in manuals and procedures, and tacit knowledge, learned only by experience, and communicated only indirectly, through metaphor and analogy. U.S. managers focus on explicit knowledge. The Japanese, on the other hand, focus on tacit knowledge. And this, the authors argue, is the key to their success--the Japanese have learned how to transform tacit into explicit knowledge. To explain how this is done--and illuminate Japanese business practices as they do so--the authors range from Greek philosophy to Zen Buddhism, from classical economists to modern management gurus, illustrating the theory of organizational knowledge creation with case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, Nissan, 3M, GE, and even the U.S. Marines. For instance, using Matsushita's development of the Home Bakery (the world's first fully automated bread-baking machine for home use), they show how tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge: when the designers couldn't perfect the dough kneading mechanism, a software programmer apprenticed herself withthe master baker at Osaka International Hotel, gained a tacit understanding of kneading, and then conveyed this information to the engineers. In addition, the authors show that, to create knowledge, the best management style is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but rather what they call "middle-up-down," in which the middle managers form a bridge between the ideals of top management and the chaotic realities of the frontline. As we make the turn into the 21st century, a new society is emerging. Peter Drucker calls it the "knowledge society," one that is drastically different from the "industrial society," and one in which acquiring and applying knowledge will become key competitive factors. Nonaka and Takeuchi go a step further, arguing that creating knowledge will become the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the future. Because the competitive environment and customer preferences changes constantly, knowledge perishes quickly. With The Knowledge-Creating Company, managers have at their fingertips years of insight from Japanese firms that reveal how to create knowledge continuously, and how to exploit it to make successful new products, services, and systems.

The knowledge-creating company

Today's electricity grid is transitioning to a so-called smart grid. The associated challenges and funding initiatives have spurred great efforts from the research community to propose innovative smart grid solutions. To assess the performance of possible solutions, simulation tools offer a cost effective and safe approach. In this paper we will provide a comprehensive overview of various tools and their characteristics, applicable in smart grid research: we will cover both the communication and associated ICT infrastructure, on top of the power grid. First, we discuss the motivation for the development of smart grid simulators, as well as their associated research questions and design challenges. Next, we discuss three types of simulators in the smart grid area: power system simulators, communication network simulators, and combined power and communication simulators. To summarize the findings from this survey, we classify the different simulators according to targeted use cases, simulation model level of detail, and architecture. To conclude, we discuss the use of standards and multi-agent based modeling in smart grid simulation.

Combining Power and Communication Network Simulation for Cost-Effective Smart Grid Analysis

In the smart grid, the large scale wind power penetration tends to expand vastly. Nevertheless, due to the intermittent power generation from wind, this may cause a problem of large frequency fluctuation when the load-frequency control (LFC) capacity is not enough to compensate the unbalance of generation and load demand. Also, in the future transport sector, the plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) is widely expected for driving in the customer side. Generally, the power of PHEV is charged by plugging into the home outlets as the dispersed battery energy storages. Therefore, the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) power control can be applied to compensate for the inadequate LFC capacity. This paper focuses on the new coordinated V2G control and conventional frequency controller for robust LFC in the smart grid with large wind farms. The battery state-of-charge (SOC) is controlled by the optimized SOC deviation control. The structure of frequency controller is a proportional integral (PI) with a single input. To enhance the robust performance and robust stability against the system uncertainties, the PI controller parameters and the SOC deviation are optimized simultaneously by the particle swarm optimization based on the fixed structure mixed H2/H∞ control. Simulation results show the superior robustness and control effect of the proposed coordinated controllers over the compared controllers.

Robust LFC in a Smart Grid With Wind Power Penetration by Coordinated V2G Control and Frequency Controller

The implementation of highly realistic real-time, massive, online, multi-time frame simulations is proposed as a means for building a common vision of smart grid functions among politicians, regulators, managers, operators, engineers, and technicians. These massive simulations will include hundreds of participants that play roles of reliability coordinators, transmission operators, distribution operators, power plant operators, and substation operators. These highly visible drills can demonstrate how the new smart grid systems, people, and processes can all work together economically and reliably. The industry, especially smart grid system designers, can get feedback from low cost, safe, and easily configurable simulations instead of waiting for expensive and hardwired deployments. Direct load control of millions of customer appliances is identified as a silver bullet to build self-healing and maximal flow smart grids that can accommodate large penetrations of intermittent wind and solar generation and rapid load growth due to plug-in electric vehicles. The paper recommends that up to 50% of load be controlled with minimal inconvenience to customers to potentially enhance angle, voltage, frequency, and thermal stability. An expert operator decision model is described with a view to helping system developers build operator-centered and friendly smart grid control systems.

The Role of Simulators for Smart Grid Development

A computer-implemented method, system, and/or computer program product supports a user who is servicing a work packet request within a software factory. A tooling environment that is necessary to service a work packet request in a software factory is established. The software factory includes an assembly line that executes work packets to create the deliverable software, and a published set of services that describes what assembly services for assembling the work packets are offered by the assembly line. A full work packet-aware Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that is specific for a work packet identified by the work packet request is created. The full work packet-aware IDE and an associated Graphical User Interface (GUI) are transmitted to a user who has been assigned to service the work packet request, thus allowing resources depicted in the GUI to be interactively supplied to that user.

Supporting a work packet request with a specifically tailored ide

A method for designing software components for integration into any system without additional coding is provided. The method includes adopting a uniform application programming interface that breaks down external objects to include the characteristics of object, attribute, and method. Ideally, the characteristics include create object, delete object, read attributes, write attributes, and invoke behavior. A software tool is provided for communication between an API and a data source, the tool including a join engine adapted to provide communication between at least one view and at least one base source associated with the data source, the join engine further adapted to update the at least one base source in response to updates to the view. Ideally, the tool is further configured to support on the at least one base source operations of create object and delete object on the at least one view. The software tool is also configured to map events in the at least one base source to the at least one view, and can be configured to create virtual attributes based on the view through operations or expressions performed on the view, including, but not limited to algebraic expressions, names, strings, and functions.

Method and system for creating reusable software components through a uniform interface

Investigations of large-scale outages in the North American interconnected electric system often attribute the causes to three t's: trees, training, and tools. To document and understand the mental processes used by expert operators when making critical decisions, a naturalistic decision making (ndm) model was developed. Transcripts of conversations were analyzed to reveal and assess ndm-based performance criteria. An item analysis indicated that the operators' situation awareness levels, mental models, and mental simulations can be mapped at different points in the training scenario. This may identify improved training methods or analytical/visualization tools. This study applies for the first time the concepts of recognition primed decision making, situation awareness levels, and cognitive task analysis to training of electric power system operators. The ndm approach provides a viable framework for systematic training management to accelerate learning in simulator-based training scenarios for power syst...

Naturalistic Decision Making for Power System Operators

Techniques for live data management are described. Some embodiments provide a Live Data Management System (“LDMS”) that provides a facility for managing live data objects and for efficiently developing client-server applications that utilize such live data objects. Live data objects are modules of computation that exist on both a client side and server side portion of a client-server application. Live data objects are configured to monitor changes to data hosted on or accessible via the server side, and to automatically update the client side without the need for polling or other requests made by the client side. The described techniques facilitate efficient software development of Web-based client server applications.

Live data as a service and corresponding programming infrastructure

This paper reviews the practices that are currently used for development, maintenance and exchange of power system operating models including the data sets and display sets. The paper then describes how the various Smart Grid functions will impact how the generation, transmission and distribution systems will need to be modeled in the future. A primary conclusion is that complete synchronous interconnections will need to be modeled down to the feeder breaker level in order to accommodate the dynamic and variable response of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, distributed generation, distributed storage, direct appliance control and real-time pricing for customers. The paper recommends that the CIM Graphic Exchange Standard (GES) be rapidly and widely adopted and implemented as critical enabler in the development, maintenance and exchange of future Smart Grid models.

Marck R. Robinson

Papers

The Role of Simulators for Smart Grid Development

Method and system for creating reusable software components through a uniform interface

Naturalistic Decision Making for Power System Operators

Live data as a service and corresponding programming infrastructure

CIM Graphic Exchange Standard for Smart Grid applications