European Commission logo
español español
CORDIS - Resultados de investigaciones de la UE
CORDIS

Testing and Evaluating Sophisticated information and communication Technologies for enaBling a smartEr griD

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - TESTBED (Testing and Evaluating Sophisticated information and communication Technologies for enaBling a smartEr griD)

Período documentado: 2019-01-01 hasta 2019-12-31

Problem: Smart grid represents new technologies for improving the efficiency, reliability, and economics of the production, transmission, and distribution of electricity. According to the European Commission Joint Research Centre’s report, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) will be the key to achieving these smart grid benefits, whereas ICT interoperability is a priority requirement for the successful implementation of smart grid. European Standardisation Organisations - CEN, CENELEC and ETSI defined the term “interoperability” as “The ability of two or more networks, systems, devices, applications, or components to interwork, to exchange and use information in order to perform required functions”. However, in reality the exchange of information over multiple communication networks is often unreliable, leading to unpredictable network Quality-of-Service (QoS) and thus unreliable smart grid applications. What’s worse, there are massive data, including metering data and measurement data, either structured or unstructured, making it extremely challenging to exploit useful information in a given time frame. Hence, there is an urgent need to solve the research problem: how to coordinate multiple communication networks to reliably transmit data, and then manage ICT system resources to efficiently extract useful information for supporting smart grid applications?

Importance and Objectives: The main focus is on improving the communication layer interoperability and the efficiency of data analytic as described in the Smart Grid Architecture Model (SGAM) Framework, by coordinating the efforts of European and Chinese experts specialised in these two different but overlapping domains. Regarding the communication layer interoperability, this project intends to develop and evaluate function-driven reliable communication frameworks. Moreover, this project will develop and verify new data integration and analytic techniques for enhancing power grid operations. These developed frameworks and methodologies will be extensively tested and evaluated in 4 well-equipped Laboratories. They will not only support the SGAM Framework, but also complement and enhance field level Standards (e.g. IEC 61850). In brief, the main objective of this project is to coordinate the action of a group of Universities and enterprises, working in the field of ICT and smart grid from both European countries and China, to build and test sophisticated ICT, thereby facilitating the successful implementation of smart grid applications.

Conclusions are threefold:
1). ICT system plays a vital role in smart grid services; when designing/developing smart grid services, ICT systems shall be fully considered as reported in Deliverable 2.1. For instance, optimal power flow (OPF) is very useful for future power systems, where ICT systems' time-delay would significantly affect the performance of OPF results as reported in our journal paper: ADMM-Based Distributed OPF Problem MeetsStochastic Communication Delay, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SMART GRID, VOL. 10, NO. 5.
2). Data integration and analytic techniques could significantly enhance future power systems performance as reported in Deliverable 4.1 in terms of increasing the penetration of renewable energy sources and electric vehicles.
3). Future power systems are very likely to be decentralised, where developing versatile and flexible testing platforms would be very beneficial, as reported in Deliverable 5.1 in terms of solving challenges in both ICT and power systems.
"The achievements to date are fourfold:
1). we investigated current ICT architectures for supporting smart grid applications that are recommended by a number of relevant standardization, and more importantly we proposed new ICT architectures and methods to improve the cost efficiency of the whole system;
2). we developed several innovative methods for optimising the function-driven communication networks for smart grid services, and run a number of simulations to gain crucial design insights for guiding real-world implementations;
3). we developed data integration and analytic techniques for enhancing the performance of future power system, and tested several application scenarios, such as peer to peer energy trading and energy scheduling;
4). we developed versatile and flexible testing platforms integrating ICT system and power system by using Real-Time-Digital-Simulator (RTDS) and software defined radio, which shed insight in decentralising future power systems.

These results are published in journals and conferences. See a full list in the ""publications"" tab. Some examples are shown as below. [All of them are open-access available in the participants’ online repository, for example, Durham’s http://dro.dur.ac.uk. ]
1) W. Zhang, J. Wang, J. Sun, C. Wang and X. Ge, ""Standard Condition Number Distributions of Finite Wishart Matrices for Cognitive Radio Networks,"" in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, vol. 67, no. 5, pp. 4630-4634, May 2018. doi:
10.1109/TVT.2017.2778257
2) Y. Ruan, Y. Li, C. Wang and R. Zhang, ""Energy Efficient Adaptive Transmissions in Integrated Satellite-Terrestrial Networks With SER Constraints,"" in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 210-222, Jan. 2018. doi:
10.1109/TWC.2017.2764472
3) J. Xu, H. Sun and C. J. Dent, ""ADMM-based Distributed OPF Problem Meets Stochastic Communication Delay,"" in IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid. doi: 10.1109/TSG.2018.2873650"
We addressed several research challenges in a scientific way (with theoretic proof and simulations, in addition all project research outcomes were peer reviewed). The remaining tasks are to validate and verify these theories and methods in laboratories. Potential impacts can be divided into:
1) Scientific impacts: guide other researchers to generate new results in this research area. we published over 70 research articles in journals and conferences, broadly disseminating the results of this project timely and in various communication channels.
2). Service/Products: this project involves both SMEs and large enterprises. Through cross-sectoral secondment, we had over 20 months time to exchange knowledge and share ideas. These could contribute to the development of new products/services. In addition, we organised Workshops and Summer School to provide training to interested audience and our researchers.
3). Wider Societal Impact: this project also contributed to the improvement of competitiveness of European organisations, and improvement of R&I potentials at both European level and Global level. European enterprises were able to have direct access to advanced equipment and significant infrastructures that can be only found in academic institutions, e.g. Smart Grid Laboratories. Moreover, this project has helped reinforce the cooperation between the European countries and China in the smart grid field. Further grants were secured building on this project, 3,890,000 RMB (i.e. EUR 519,197) was awarded by China MOST to encourage more collaborations among this project's beneficiaries/partners. In addition, TESTBED2 (grant number 872172) has been successfully funded building on existing consoritium, meanwhile expanding networks to new countries including Austria, France, Germany, Romania and USA (Princeton, California).