Predicting solar energy production on micro scale with Watson
By bogaert
Undefined
Predicting the future isn’t easy, but new technologies such as Watson and the availability of accurate data are a great help to do so. I mentioned in previous blog posts already my progress in connecting the grid inverter from the solar panels with Watson IoT. I also tapped into the weather API to know the historical weather observations and the weather forecast. In total I collect following four data sources:
Herewith the seven lessons learned after working for a couple of weeks with the solar energy production data and with the weather data where I have been building a statistical model to correlate both datasets. During my work I have been using following three data sets:
- The energy production data of the solar panels (data every 5 minutes of the day)
- The weather observations historical data (hourly data)
I tried to figure out how much energy will be produced for each hour of the next day. To do so I integrated several aspects, such as Watson IoT, the Weather API, Watson Analytics, and bundled it all together on the Bluemix platform.
In today’s business environment, the data center – and the services that come with it – has become a commodity. A strategic partnership between IBM and VMware now enables businesses to simply move workloads between the data center and the cloud, while keeping full control.
As companies make plans to move workloads to the cloud, the virtualization factor seemed to be the last hurdle. Thanks to IBM and VMware’s strategic partnership, that hurdle now belongs to the past.
In my previous blog post I described how I connected the home automation environment to Watson IoT. Now I took it a step further. I connected the values captured by the inverters of the solar production plant to Watson IoT.
Ever thought on connecting your home to a cognitive system? I gave it a trial! Here a brief description on how I made it work.
Within the house we have different protocols, being IEB for the house appliances, MiLight to control the colour of the lightning, a specific datalogger for the solar panels, Sonos for audio, and some IP cameras. My focus for this experiment was to connect in the first place with the EIB bus. The diagram bellows outlines how the connection is realised.
As published in the liber amicorum of Prof. dr. H. Jaap van den Herik, Tilburg University, 29 Jan 2016
The path of continuous innovative ICT research by Jaap van den Herik and my path of remaining ambition to start a Ph.D. crossed in Rotterdam, back in 2008. Since that initial discussion I have the honour to work on my Ph.D. under the supervision of Jaap van den Herik for a period of almost four years. The research subject of Cloud Computing was new at that point in time. Now, four years later, the landscape has changed already. The pace of innovation and change in information technology is high, therefore I like to amend our initial findings with the following two conclusions: (1) Cloud revised and (2) Cloud to Singularity.
Agile with the next generation of cloud platforms, but which cloud platform to choose?
By bogaert
Undefined
Need your development to become more agile? Looking for a smooth hand-over from development to operations? Want to develop web and mobile application quickly? Using infrastructure as a service in development and operations had been a tremendous improvement in agile development, but the initial setup of each service still requires lots of time and a wide diversity of skills. Every service used in the application must be initially created and every deployment requires specific skills to have the service properly configured. So, what’s the alternative today?
It’s time to share an update on my previous blog on ‘Business Agility through Cloud in Development and Operations’, which dates back from 2013! Over the past year major IT service providers made new PaaS offering available. Google introduced the Google App Engine platform as an easy way to develop and deploy applications using Google’s technologies. Microsoft did the same with the Azure platform, Amazon created its own environment with the Elastic BeanStalk platform, and IBM launched the open standards based platform Bluemix. These cloud environments make it easy to develop, deploy, and manage applications like web and mobile. The game changer in these environments is the way services are made available to the application developers. A wide variety of services, such as different database technologies, mobile push services, message queuing services, geo-coding services, analytics services, etc. can be used. In a traditional IaaS approach these services would require the creation of an image running the service, the customization of the service, and the management of the service. In a PaaS environment a service instance can be created with the click on a button. The environment will take care of the deployment and management. The developer can focus on the use of the service with the application.
Don’t worry … Brussels will remain the most congested city of the world for a long time!
By bogaert
Undefined
The capital Brussels is listed among many statistics as the most congested cities of the world. According to the annual INRIX Traffic Scorecard, drivers in Brussels face the worst traffic jams in the world. One can think we never thought about solving this painful situation, but the complexity goes far beyond using good common sense. So, which are the different options that would help to improve the current situation and why are they still not implemented? Let me share with you ten ideas and my thoughts about why they don’t work:
