The 2-day project meeting was hosted by Vattenfall in Stockholm. On the first day, the focus was on the identification of the business use cases (BUCs) based on the IEC 62559 standard. For this, Gianluca Lipari and Gonca Gürses-Tran organized an interactive session to share the progress and discuss and develop the current status of the BUCs of the demos in Greece, Spain and Sweden.

On tuesday, 9th April 2019 at 14:30 (date changed!) the next FEIN e.V. Colloquium will take place in the E.ON ERC in room 00.23. Prof. Pierluigi Mancarella will be a guest speaker and talk about: "Reliability and resilience in low-carbon power systems: challenges and solutions down-under". More detail about the invitation can be found at the link.

On March 26th and 27th, the consortium meeting of the ENVELOPE project takes place, where the latest research results are being discussed.

Tim Schlösser successfully defended his disseration "Methodology for Holistic Evaluation of Building Energy Systems Under Dynamic Boundary Conditions".

Prof. Monti, Marco Pau and Jan Dinkelbach represented ACS during the SOGNO review meeting held in Brussels. The SOGNO consortium presented the status of the activities after the first year of work as well as the main innovations proposed within the project.
More information about the project can be found at the SOGNO website.

eSafeNet has studied how to make a secure communications architecture for distributed energy grids. At the final project meeting the work of ACS in developing a method to use locally available distributed energy generation and storage resources to autonomously and automatically recover from blackouts was demonstrated. A second demo concerned the joint work of ACS and Ericsson to develop a method to ensure that the locally available distributed energy generation and storage resources are able to communicate with LTE during the blackout (in the situation where the blackout emergency causes the mobile network operator to reduce access of subscribers to the network in order to ensure continued access of emergency services).

Abhinav Sadu, Marija Stevic and Nikolaus Wirtz represented ACS in the DEFENDER project meeting in Bled (Slovenia), hosted by Jožef Stefan Institute​ and the Institute for Corporate Security Studies.

The results of the H2020 ADMS project, ended in 2018 have been summarized in a YouTube video available at the link below.

In cooperation with Systems Software Reserch Group of the Virginia Tech (USA), the first version of HermiTux was published. A corresponding paper will be presented on the 15th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments.

ACS hosted the Advisory Board Meeting of the SOGNO project. Prof. Monti, Marco Pau and Jan Dinkelbach represented ACS during the meeting.
More information about the project can be found at the SOGNO website.

On Febuary 20th, Jens Breitbart and Stefan Lankes presented on "Parallel 2019", how task and data parallelisation can be realized using the programming language "Rust".

On 12 to 14 February, the ELSA consortium presented its final results to the EU Commission, represented by Project Officer Dana Dutianu.

Prof. Monti, Dr. Lankes, Maliheh Haghgoo and Alberto Dognini attended the FISMEP project meeting, hosted by ACS.

Nikolaus Wirtz presented the SUCCESS and DEFENDER approaches to Security Operation Center Development and Intrusion Detection Systems at Energy Intrusion Detection 2019 in Amsterdam.

Aysar Musa successfully defended his dissertation "Advanced Control Strategies for Stability Enhancement of Future AC/DC Networks".

Gianluca Lipari and Gonca Gürses-Tran represented ACS during the initial kickoff meeting that was hosted by Endesa. The project consortium consists of in total 23 partners from 10 countries with the overall objective to achieve large scale campaigns to demonstrate how TSO-DSO shall act in a coordinated manner to procure grid services in the most reliable and efficient way.

Some of the comments:

It is to be expected that the adoption of new and modified network and grid codes takes longer than the project duration. Moving target. Regulators don't want to implement something that may change in couple of years, so it takes time.

Field trials and economical evaluation are very important. Disseminate through BRIDGE and other ways. Someone must finance the changes proposed. If you say that in 2 years plans will change again, the sponsors will not be happy. So economic evaluation must take this into account. Numbers are needed about the needed capital investment, maintenance upgrade etc.

Even if grid codes are not yet implemented, they have aleady triggered new thinking by regulators and TSOs/DSOs which is a good thing.

Marco Pau and Jan Dinkelbach represented ACS during the SOGNO project meeting in Tallinn, Estonia. The event was hosted by Ericsson Estonia.

On Thursday, January 24th at 10:30 the information event for third semester takes place in the E.ON ERC main building in the rooms 00.23/00.24. All students of the faculty of electrical engineering and information technology are invited. The event is especially aimed at third semester students, who can inform themselves about the specializations in future semesters. The event is held together by institutes ACS and PGS.

Prof. Ponci was selected as a 2018 Outstanding Reviewer of the IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement.

Nikolaus Wirtz represented ACS in the DEFENDER project review of the first reporting period in Brussels.

On Thursday 29th November, Mr. Steffen Vogel participated at the ceremonial inauguration of the Smart Grid Interoperability Laboratory in Petten, Netherlands. For this event, ACS contributed in collaboration with their colleagues from Politecnico di Turino a small demonstration. Similar to the inauguration of the European Interoperability Centre for Electric Vehicles and Smart Grids in Ispra in the year 2015, we presented our work on geographically distributed real-time simulation by showing the interconnection of the laboratories in Ispra, Petten, Turin and Aachen. For this demonstration the in-house developed platform "VILLASframework" has been used.

As part of the activities of the ​Forum Smart Grid for Smart City (SG4SC) in Genk, Prof. Ponci gives the presentation "The energy pulse of the city" in the Technical Session "Distributed Monitoring and Advanced Measurements in Smart Cities". The session is organized by Dr. Ana-Maria Dumitrescu (Polihnica University of Bucharest). Co-speakers with Prof. Ponci are Prof. Muscas (University of Cagliari) and Prof. Patti (Politecnico di Torino).

​SUCCESS project held its third and final open day, hosted by ESB in Dublin. The event was addressed by ESB CEO and other ESB top executives were present, e.g. the responsible for cyber-security. ESB supported the project's approach to combatting attacks on critical infrastructures and anticipate the need to invest in this area. A highlight was the address of Kevin Foley of the Irish body which co-ordinates fighting cyber-attacks, the National Cyber Security Centre, explaining their work and that they already try to co-ordinate information sharing between actors such as critical infrastructure operators, authorities and firms. SUCCESS is proposing developing an automated system to support this information sharing, and it was the consensus that this is needed.
The SUCCESS final review was held on 29.11, ending the project.

On 28th November, Prof. Ferdinanda Ponci and Steffen Vogel participated at the 2nd IEEE International Forum 'Smart Grids for Smart Cities' in Genk.
They presented their current research activities in two panel sessions.
Prof. Ponci joined the session "Distributed monitoring and advanced measurements in smart cities".
In the session "Living Labs and Hardware test facilities", Mr. Vogel held his presentation "Virtually Interconnected Laboratories for Large Power-System Simulations" which gave an overview of current and past laboratory interconnections used for geographically distributed real-time simulation.

On November 27th, Michael Diekerhof gave the introduction presentation about the “demand for a reference architecture” at the smart energy session of the FIWARE Global Summit in Malaga. He also was part of a panel discussion lead by the European commission to discuss the future role of platforms in the smart energy sector.

Sara Khayyamim successfully defended her dissertation "Centralized-decentralized Energy Management in Railway System".

The DEFENDER project organi​zed a workshop on "Personal data protection in Critical Infrastructures" in Rome on November 20th. Dr. Gianluca Lipari represented ACS at the workshop and presented the synergies with the SUCCESS project.

Ivelina Stoyanova, Nikolaus Wirtz, Robert Ferdinand, Sebastian Schwarz und Ting Wang successfully presented their research papers at the IEEE PES ISGT Europe 2018 Conference in Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina). The titles of the papers can be found at the link.

​7th eSafeNet Consortium meeting took place in Frankfurt at premises of KaCon.

On Wednesday, 24th of October, ACS joined the inaugural summit of the new Linux Foundation Energy (LFE) group in Edinburgh, UK. Initiated by RTE, the transmission grid operator of France, the group aims at developing Open Source Software for accelerating innovation in automation and control of future energy systems.

Dr. David Raisz was elevated to the grade of IEEE Senior Member.

Prof. Ponci, Dr. Cupelli and Prof. Monti gave a tutorial presentation in cooperation with Dr. T. Strasser from AIT at IEEE IECON 2018. The tutorial covered the challenges in testing and validating modern Cyberphysical Energy Systems. The presentation is now available in IEEE TV.

Abhinav Sadu is invited to speak at the 5th annual IEC 61850 Global conference in Berlin. The conference is attended by prominent TSOs and DSOs of Europe, USA, Asia, Africa and Australia. The topic of the talk is how IEC 61850 could be uused in distribution grid automation and specifically for DER intergration.

The ETIP Smart Networks for Energy Transition (SNET) role is to guide Research, Development & Innovation (RD&I) to support Europe’s energy transition. eSafeNet was presented to Working Group 4 (Digitisation of the electricity system and Customer participation) in Brussels.

Nikolaus Wirtz represented ACS in the DEFENDER project meeting in Lecce (Italy), hosted by Engineering Ingegneria Informatica.

Alberto Dognini attended the FISMEP Project meeting, hosted by "Politehnica" University of Bucharest.

On 8 October 2018 Dr. Lankes presented the first results of the Envelope project on the HPC status conference of the Gauß-Allianz in Erlangen.

On 17 October 2018 Dr. Lankes and Dr. Breitbart presented Rust as a secure programming language at the Heise devSec().

Prof. Monti and Dr. Marco Pau represented the SOGNO project at the H2020 Smart Grids and Storage projects clustering workshop, which was held in Brussels. The SOGNO project was actively involved in the working groups on Data Management and on Technologies, Tools and Models for electricity grids.

Prof. Antonello Monti was sworn in on October 1st 2008 as one of the first professors during the rectorship of Ernst Schmachtenberg. As he swore in, he founded the Institute for Automation of Complex Power Systems. Meanwhile the Institute consists of the two chairs ACS and MOD. We celebrate the ten year anniversary on October 12th 2018.

Anica Frehn and Robert Uhl attended the first German HiL workshop at KIT in Karlsruhe. They presented the real time simulation and Hardware-in-the-Loop capabilities of the ACS laboratory as well as the Center for Wind Power Drives (CWD).

Prof. Monti, Marco Pau, Jonas Bielemeier and Jan Dinkelbach represented ACS during the SOGNO project meeting in Kilkenny, Ireland. The project was hosted by ESB and the Waterford Institute of Technology.
More information about the project can be found at the SOGNO website.

Abhinav Sadu and Nikolaus Wirtz represented ACS in a workshop in Ljubljana on vulnerability analysis of power and communcation networks with the slowenian TSO ELES.

Alberto Dognini presented FISMEP project at the ERA-Net SES Family of Projects Event, from 17th to 19th September, hosted by Fraunhofer IFF in Magdeburg.

In a joint technical workshop, the ERIGrid consortium invited the Institute for Automation of Complex Power Systems (ACS) to OFFIS in Oldenburg. In two sessions, ACS and the ERIGrid project presented their research activities in the area of laboratory interconnections and distributed co-simulation. Prof. Monti gave an introduction to the VILLAS concept, followed by Marija Stevic with applications of distributed real-time co-simulation and Steffen Vogel who presented the tools and architecture of VILLASframework. Advisory board member Prof. Monti, used the chance to provide feedback to the recent progress made in ERIGrid Joint Research Activities 2-4. In conclusion new topics for future collaboration and potential inputs for an ERIGrid-II project have been identified. We thank Thomas Strasser in his role as ERIGrid project coordinator for his invitation and are looking forward to future collaborations. Further Information can be found at the link.

At the event, solutions for network stability with the increasing utilization of renewable energies are discussed. More Information can be found at the link.

The journal paper "Peak shaving: a planning alternative to reduce investment costs in distribution systems?" was published by Baptiste Feron in Energy System Springer in open access. The paper can be found at the link.

On July 30th ACS organized the first hackathon of the SUCCESS project. The event was hosted by the Institute for Theoretical Information Technology of RWTH Aachen. During the hackathon students and researchers were invited to test the SUCCESS Security Solution and, specifically, the Data Centric Security solution developed by ERICSSON in the scope of the SUCCESS project.

Prof. Ponci has been elected member of the Administrative committee election ballot 2018 of the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society for the term 2019-2022.