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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TESTBED (Testing and Evaluating Sophisticated information and communication Technologies for enaBling a smartEr griD)

Teaser

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...

Summary

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: TESTBED is a major interdisciplinary project that combines wisdoms in three academic disciplines - Electronics Engineering, Power Engineering and Computing Sciences, to address the aforesaid research problem. 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.

Work performed

\"The achievements to date are two-fold:
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.

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) M. You, J. Jiang, A. M. Tonello, T. Doukoglou and H. Sun, \"\"On statistical power grid observability under communication constraints (invited paper),\"\" in IET Smart Grid, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 40-47, 7 2018. doi: 10.1049/iet-stg.2018.0009
2) J. W. Heron, J. Jiang, H. Sun, V. Gezerlis and T. Doukoglou, \"\"Demand-Response Round-Trip Latency of IoT Smart Grid Network Topologies,\"\" in IEEE Access, vol. 6, pp. 22930-22937, 2018. doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2831254
3) D. Li, W. Chiu, H. Sun and H. V. Poor, \"\"Multiobjective Optimization for Demand Side Management Program in Smart Grid,\"\" in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 1482-1490, April 2018. doi: 10.1109/TII.2017.2776104
4) 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
5) 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
6) 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

\"

Final results

The key-challenging problem in smart grid is to provide reliable and quality-assured information services to support smart grid applications. This significant challenging issue can be further refined into three scientific questions:
1) What the best ICT infrastructure will look like for supporting a specific smart grid application, and how to define its technical requirements, such as QoS metrics?
2) How to reliably meet these technical requirements when exchanging information over multiple communication networks, especially over heterogeneous networks, such that the performance of smart grid application can be guaranteed?
3) Given limited system resources, how to effectively gather the most relevant information from massive data, and fuse them in an efficient manner to support smart grid decision-makings?

To date, we have addressed these questions 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 will keep tracking the citation report of our publications;
2). Service/Products: this project involves both SMEs and large enterprises. Through cross-sectoral secondment, we had near 24 months time to exchange knowledge and share ideas. These could contribute to the development of new products/services. In addition, we organised Workshop 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.

Website & more info

More info: https://www.testbed-rise.com/.