Yijun Chen

We use Gaussian mixtures to model formation and evolution of multi-modal beliefs and opinion uncertainty across social networks. In this model, opinions evolve by Bayesian belief update when incorporating exogenous factors (signals from outside sources, e.g., news articles) and by non-Bayesian mixing dynamics when incorporating endogenous factors (interactions across social media). The modeling enables capturing the richness of behavior observed in multi-modal opinion dynamics while maintaining interpretability and simplicity of scalar models. We present preliminary results on opinion formation and uncertainty to investigate the effect of stubborn individuals (as social influencers). This leads to a notion of centrality based on the ease with which an individual can disrupt the flow of information across the social network.

The recent widespread adoption of rooftop solar backed by battery storage is enabling energy customers to both produce and consume electricity (i.e., prosumers of electricity). To facilitate prosumer participation in the electric grid, new market mechanisms are required. In this paper, we design peer-to-peer energy markets where prosumers trade their excess energy with peers to gain profit while satisfying the overall balance in electricity supply and demand. We first consider a market structure, considering the case where voltage and/or thermal constraints are binding. When such grid constraints are binding, market clearing prices can vary across locations. However, heterogeneous prices may be considered by regulators to lack fairness. To ensure uniform pricing, we design two peer-to-peer energy markets with dynamic operating envelopes (DOEs). DOEs enable us to decompose global voltage and thermal constraints across the power grid into local constraints for each prosumer, resulting in uniform prices across the grid. By means of numerical simulations on an IEEE 13-node feeder, we benchmark the proposed market-based approaches in the presence of binding voltage constraints.