Grant and Period

Project selected from the AAU Talent Programme.

Project Period: 2017 - 2019

Host Institution: Aalborg University.

Summary

At present, new market, regulatory structures and new energy services in the smart grid seems to be the response to profound changes in the way that energy should be generated, stored, distributed, managed and finally consumed. What makes the global challenge particularly severe is the essential role that energy is playing as a whole. In fact, ecological and sustainability awareness, comfort‐oriented consumers’ behavior, etc., are the factors which are becoming more and more complex to address especially when there is a massive input of smart devices combined with multiple operating systems taking into account interoperability and compatibility issues.

On the other hand, the world is changing rapidly thanks to the technology revolution having an enormous impact on our daily lives at work and at home. In fact, in conjunction with the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0), Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm seems to increase the visibility of energy consumption by providing intelligent and automated systems to improve comfort and energy efficiency through comprehensive solutions for connectivity, manageability, and security in the future smart grids.

Also, thanks to the distributed allocation of smart sensors and smart meters, real‐time energy consumption data can be collected easily and monitored in a user‐friendly interface to improve energy‐aware decision‐making.

This project research will focus on models, methods and techniques/tools that will enable a new level of intelligence and effectiveness in IT infrastructures for a user‐interactive energy system which can also be called Internet of Energy. More specifically, advanced IoT‐based structures, algorithms, and functionalities will be developed to initially interact with the surrounding environment in terms of sensing and metering (e.g., electricity, heat and water in case of Denmark), then processing the information to extract knowledge for more efficient data management and transmission and eventually
optimize energy efficiency in both supply and demand sides. The challenge of this project is to create a path to achieve the intelligent energy grid vision for identifying the opportunities that IoT technologies provide for smart energy systems encompassing distributed generators, virtual power plants, or even microgrids.

Social Impact

Generally, the Smart Grid and the environment it creates is deemed as the Internet of Energy. If there is an adaptation on the behavior of the prosumer devices based on the information that they receive such as electricity price, then energy consuming/producing devices will not be black boxes but can be adapted accordingly instead.

Billions of smart devices are connected to each other, all sharing data securing via the Internet. The following is a list of countries by IoT devices online per 100 inhabitants as published by the OECD in 2015. Note that Denmark is in the second place after South Korea with 32.7 devices online per 100 inhabitants. Some definition of IoT states that IoT era may start when this number reaches 100, i.e. when we cross the barrier of having one device online per habitant. In fact, the interconnection of the technologies themselves will not be valued unless citizens understand the gains.

Project Participants

Postdoctoral Fellow (2018) Emilio Palacios

Postdoctoral Fellow (2018) Feng Wei

Research Assistant: Yonghao Gui

Postdoctoral Fellow (2018) Enrique Diaz

Collaborators

Postdoctoral Researchers Amjad Anvari-Moghaddam and Mehdi Savaghebi