Robert Ferdinand successfully defended his dissertation "Grid Operation of HVDC-Connected Offshore Wind Farms: Power Quality and Switching Strategies".

Ting Wang has given an oral presentation about his research work in FEN research Project about the protection of DC distribution grids on 04.06 in the conference PEDG 2019 in Xi'an, China.

Dr. Marco Cupelli, Henning Wilms and Gonca Gürses-Tran each presented a poster on their research activities covering advanced control schemes and forecasting techniques with reference to the H2020 INTERFLEX project.

Gonca Gürses-Tran and Hendrik Flamme represented ACS at the IHK Aachen workshop on challenges and opportunities associated with the imminent structural transformation in the Rhenish lignite mining area. In this context, future scenarios were developed and it was discussed how regional research facilities could contribute to realize those scenarios. In particular, the focus of the event was on digitalization and artificial intelligence.

Dr. Pau presented the tool developed in the SOGNO project for the optimal placement of switches in distribution grids at the 1st International Conference on Energy Transition in the Mediterranean Area (SyNERGYMED), held in Cagliari (Italy).

Prof. Ferdinanda Ponci and Wilbert Tarnate represented ACS in ASSET's kickoff meeting. ATOS, the project coordinator, hosted the meeting from May 27 to May 28, 2019, in Madrid, Spain. Around 30 participants from academic and industry partners from 6 European countries are present in the meeting. ASSET aims to establish a sustainable ecosystem for energy transition and education stakeholders. In ASSET, ACS will lead the preparation of learning contents for university programs and MOOCs.​

Robert Uhl attends the biennial workshop on system identification at the ELEC department, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Brussels, Belgium, from 27.5. until 21.6.2019. More information on the workshop can be found at the link.

Prof. Ponci participates to the Administration Committee meetings of the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society in Auckland, New Zealand. An intense week culminating in the full day AdCom meeting, to serve the IMS members at best.

Bettina Schäfer and Diala Nouti represented ACS during the coordination kick-off meeting that was hosted by the project coordinator Enedis at their premises in Paris. The consortium includes 15 European partners from 9 European Union member states and Tata Power from India with the overall objective of increasing the role of Local Energy Communities (LECs) for speeding up Renewable Energy Sources (RES) integration in power grids. ​​​

The kickoff meeting of the new BMWi project AGENT was held on 23rd May at the Bosch Research Campus in Renningen. ACS was represented by Igor Sowa and Stefan Dähling. AGENT deals with agent-based energy management systems in nonresidential buildings. Project partners are Robert Bosch GmbH, FAU Erlangen and RWTH Aachen University with the two institutes EBC and ACS.

Prof. Ponci presents the new OS-based low cost PMU and a contactless sensor for domestic power measurement in Auckland, New Zealand at I2MTC 2019, the flagship conference of the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society.

The RESERVE Open Day was held at ESB Networks in Dublin, Ireland on 15.05.2019. ESB is running 7 field trials of the voltage control techniques developed in RESERVE to support 100% renewable energy source penetration.  Pictures from the Open Day are at the link. Also, a project meeting was held at UCD in Dublin.

Dr. Pau and Prof. Monti presented the SOGNO and RESERVE project at the InnoGrid conference in Brussels. InnoGrid is a EU event on innovation in electricity networks organised by the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E) and the European Distribution System Operators for Smart Grids (EDSO), which showcases the most innovative projects at European level in the field of electrical transmission and distribution grids.

Prof. Monti, Gianluca Lipari and Gonca Gürses-Tran followed up on the work for load forecasting in the Malmö area. The forecasts will be implented on the future TSO-DSO platform for the project demo in Sweden. 

Since April, Dr. Stefan Lankes is member of the executive committee of the section PARS and the technical committee ARCS of the "Gesellschaft für Informatik".

Together with the colleagues from Systems Software Research Group at Virginia Tech, we develop the unikernel HermiTux, which is binary compatible to Linux and able to run native Linux executables. For a detailed description please read the Hermitux paper, which was presented at 15th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments (VEE’19) and won the best paper award.

A delegation from the University of Melbourne visited the E.ON ERC on 8.4. and toured the laboratories in the main building. In the following Prof. Monti and Prof. Mancarella (UoM) discussed via teleconference with a group of colleagues in Australia about possible future cooperation. In the afternoon of the same day Prof. Mancarella gave a very interesting seminar about the current situation of the energy system in Australia and the challenges related to power systems dynamics with high penetration of renewables.

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.

Nikolaus Wirtz presented DEFENDER at the fit4sec network meeting in Berlin. fit4sec is a program by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and is aiming to strengthen German security research by providing support in writing proposals and building consortiums targeting EU research programs.

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.

The ENSURE Cluster 4 workshop was held on 27th February at Nexans in Hannover. ACS was represented by Igor Sowa and Stefan Dähling. Besides the review of the current progress in the cluster "New Technologies", the participants also discussed the planning of the subsequent project phase

The GA of the Association DERlab (in which ACS is member since 2018) was held together with a workshop on 25th and 26th of February at the Enel Green Power Innovation Hub in Catania, Italy. ACS was represented by David Raisz, who gave a short introduction to the Institute's research on 5G technology, used in RESERVE, NRG5 and SOGNO.

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".

The ENSURE Cluster 3 workshop was held on 19th February at EnergieCampus Nürnberg, together with WP workshops the days before. ACS was represented by David Raisz and Lukas Razik. Besides the review of the current progress in the cluster "System operation Concepts", the participants also discussed the planning of project phase 2, which aims at lab scale / pilot scale implementation.

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.

Simon Pickartz successfully defended his disseration "Virtualization as an enabler for dynamic resource allocation in HPC".

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.