Dr. Fenghui Ren

VC's Postdoctoral Fellow • School of Computer Science and Software Engineering • University of Wollongong

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  • PROJECT 13 (Sep. 2014 - Present)

Title: Multi-Agent Social Learning for Market Prediction

Support by: University of Wollongong

Duty: This is a PhD project and I co-supervise the PhD candidate (Mr. Xishun Wang) with Prof. Minjie Zhang. In a large complex Smart Grid market, usually brokers are introduced for power trading. We design an intelligent broker agent—GongBroker, basing on the platform of Power TAC, which simulates a real world Smart Grid market. GongBroker buys energy from the wholesale market through auctions, and sells energy to various consumers in retail market. In our design, we deeply explore the customer consumption behaviors with a data-driven method. All the consumers are clustered according to their historical energy consumptions, and one-day-ahead hourly usage of each consumer cluster is predicted by Logistic regression. Basing on the predicted usages, the auction module employs an MDP process for one-day-ahead auction. To compete with other trading agents, GongBroker uses independent reinforcement learning processes to generate different tariffs for different types of consumers.

 

  • PROJECT 12 (Sep. 2014 - Present)

Title: Adaptive Resource Allocation Strategies for Emergency Management

Support by: University of Wollongong

Duty: This is a PhD project and I co-supervise the PhD candidate (Mr. Jihang Zhang) with Prof. Minjie Zhang. In emergency management, one of the most important phase is to allocate human resource or materials to mitigate the damage caused by the events. For small-scale emergency events, public emergency services like police force, are department and ambulances can be used to control the damage. But for larger-scale emergency events, the damage control is obviously beyond the capability of these public emergency services. For examples, after a strong earthquake that happened in highly inhabited areas, thousands of people could be killed or affected. Under such situation, the search and rescue in the first few days is extremely important for victims, and it is obvious that separated public emergency services or departments cannot make efficient response if there is no applicable strategies to allocate or coordinate them. One promising way to make fast and effective resource allocation for large-scale emergency events is to use computer science and information technology.

 

  • PROJECT 11 (Jan 2015 - Dec. 2015)

Title: Strengthening Research and Education Collaboration with Dalian University of Technology (DUT) in China

Support by: University of Wollongong ($7,500)

Duty: I am the chief investigator of this project. The aims of this project are (1) to strengthen and broaden current research collaboration between two research teams; (2) to build a long-term partnership between the two institutions by discovering potential opportunities for developing collaborative teaching programs in computer science in both undergraduate and postgraduate levels; (3) to initiate a research training program in a postgraduate level by exchanging visiting research students around the topics of agent-based coordination, learning, negotiation and self-organization; (4) to lead to future joint applications for competitive grants in both countries; and (5) to develop effective mechanisms that will enable autonomous agents to achieve smart management of vehicular networks and Internet of Things (IoT) in open domains through the research collaboration between the Intelligent Systems Research Centre (ISR) at UOW and the Key Research Centre of Internet of Things and Collaborative Sensing (ITCS) at DUT.

 

  • PROJECT 10 (Jan 2014 - Dec. 2016)

Title: An Adaptive and Intelligent SLA Negotiation System for Web-Based Service-Oriented Grid Computing

Support by: ARC DECRA ($391,947), University of Wollongong ($184,000)

Duty: I am the chief investigator of this project. Mr. Lei Niu is a PhD candidate (co-supervised with Prof. Minjie Zhang) of this project. This project will develop an intelligent negotiation system for Service Level Agreement (SLA) in web-based service-oriented grid computing. The specific aims include (1) computational models for SLA negotiation representation; (2) intelligent managements of SLA negotiation procedures; and (3) adaptive learning for SLA negotiation system improvement. The significance of this project lies in its promises to realize the automation of SLA negotiation through using intelligent and computational models, so as to greatly improve the efficiency of web-based service systems. The research results will enable software engineers to develop more robust and intelligent service-oriented systems through web-based computational grids.

 

  • PROJECT 9 (July 2012 - Dec. 2014)

Title: A Multi-Agent Solution for Smart Grid System Modelling, Simulation, and Management by Considering Distributed and Renewable Energy Resources and Local Power Storages

Support by: University of Wollongong

Duty: I am the main researcher of this project. The objective of this project is to propose a multi-agent system to model, simulate and manage a Smart Grid (SG) system under different circumstances in automatic and efficient ways. Power management strategies will be proposed to dynamically balance the power supply and demand in the SG system, and self-healing mechanisms will be generated to intelligently diagnose the faults and to automatically restore the system from outages. The significance of this project lies in its promise to develop a new infrastructure for intelligent modelling, simulating and managing a SG system by considering reliability, efficiency, environmental and economy issues.

 

  • PROJECT 8 (July 2010 - June 2012)

Title: Emergency Control of Catastrophic Disturbances in a Power System  

Support by: Australia Research Council and TransGrid Company

Duty: I was the main researcher of this project. In this project, local intelligence in distributed monitoring systems was used to deal with the uncertainty posed by unforeseeable extreme contingencies in power systems due to potential disasters such as those caused by terrorist attacks. Pattern recognition of parameter changes was used to identify the causes of a breakdown and to identify the most affected localities. Once identified, designs based on systems of intelligent agents in a multi-agent system, were used to model the distributed control system, and to provide intelligent computation decisions and asynchronous strategies to activate the necessary countermeasures.

 

  • PROJECT 7 (January 2010 - June 2010)

Title: Data Analysis and Mining in the Presence of Noise

Support by: Australian Government Attorney-General’s Department

Duty: I was the main researcher of this project. I was responsible for investigating technologies and tools from existing data mining approaches, and extending these existing technologies and tools to handle raw and/or noisy data without a pre-processing, i.e. data clean, data normalization, and etc.

 

  • PROJECT 6 (January 2009 - December 2009)

Title: Agent-Based Simulation and Pattern Analysis from Transactional Data

Support by: Australian Government Attorney-General’s Department

Duty: I was one of the researchers in this project. I was responsible for planning theoretical research and practical work. Our research group had designed and implemented an agent-based system for simulating and analysing transactional data. The system combined data mining, social network analysis and agent techniques together, and provided knowledge mining, pattern discovery and decision supporting services to users.

  

 

  • PROJECT 5 (July 2006 - June 2010)

Title: Autonomous Agent Negotiation Strategies in Complex Environments

Support by: University of Wollongong

Duty: This was my PhD project. In this project, I deeply investigated agent negotiation problems in complex environment and proposed six negotiation approaches to solve negotiation problems in different environments, such as regression-based agent behaviour prediction, linear and nonlinear based partner selection, market-based model for both single and multi-issue negotiation, multiple related negotiation network for concurrent negotiation. Nineteen research papers, including five book chapters and six journal papers, were published to demonstrate the research outcomes of my PhD study (see my publication list).

 

  • PROJECT 4 (May 2007 - November 2007)

Title: Multi-Agent Trading Environment Supporting E-Trading in an Open Market

Support by: University of Wollongong

Duty: This was a undergraduate student final project, and finished by a group of four students. I was the advisor of the project. As an advisor, I needed to give advises to students in aspects of system design, system implementation, and system evaluation. Also, I needed to check progress reports and development documents, and gave feedbacks to students. The grade of this project was Distinction.

 

  • PROJECT 3 (February 2004 - June 2006)

Title: Multi-Image Query Content-Based Image Retrieval Developing

Support by: University of Wollongong

Duty: This was my research master project. In this project, I studied content-based image retrieval approaches, and MPEG-7 descriptors. I proposed two weighting approach to adjust both the intra weight (weighting different features in a descriptor) and inter weight (weighting different descriptors) by employing a multi-image query strategy.

 

  • PROJECT 2 (February 2005 - May 2005)

Title: Impressio -An Online Content-Based Image Retrieval System

Support by: University of Wollongong

Duty: I was the main researcher of this project. Impressio was an online content-based image retrieval system. By employing the text-based image retrieval results from Google, Impressio can refine the retrieval results by considering the visual features of images. Impressio was in the finalist of first Trailblazer in the University of Wollongong.

        

 

  • PROJECT 1 (June 2002 - June 2003)

Title: Database Design and Access

Support by: XiDian University

Duty: This was my graduate project, and completed by myself. My role in this project was to design and implement the system which had the ability to set up, access and modify the database under different standard such as, DB2, Informix, Oracle, etc. The system was built up under the Microsoft Windows XP operating system with C++ Builder. The grade of this project was Distinction.