On September 6th, 2023, Prof. Monti received the UNIPRENEURS award at a ceremony in Berlin at the Allianz Forum at the Brandenburger Tor.

UNIPRENEURS, with patron Bettina Stark-Watzinger, Federal Ministry of Education and Research, recognizes professors who have made a significant contribution to a distinctive start-up culture at universities.

The award winners were selected based upon nominations from founders.

Invitation to the Online Workshop: "Integration of Flexibilities into the Energy System and Challenges for the Coordination between Transmission and Distribution System Operators".

The Platone Project presented its nearly four years of activities during its final conference on June 28. The conference was held at the Faculty and included a keynote address by Luis Cunha, Director of European Policies and Projects at E-Redes and Vice Chair of ETIP SNET. The event also included a panel discussion on open source solutions to promote the energy transition. Participants also had the opportunity to learn about the project's Key Exploitable Results (KERs).

The consortium of the German living lab research project TransUrban.NRW held a project meeting on the topic "TransUrban.NRW in implementation – opportunities and challenges".

The ACS once again invites you to the ACS Student Event on June 5th from 16:00 at the EON Energy Research Center, Mathieust. 10. We’ll show you opportunities and are looking forward to
your questions. After a general institute introduction, we will have individual team sessions, a lab tour and a
get-together with BEER & BRÖTCHEN at our institute.

The event will be run in English language.

Maliheh Haghgoo could successfully defend her dissertation about "Semantic Interoperability as a Service for the Smart Energy System".

The International Smart Grid Action Network (ISGAN) is an international platform for experts to develop and share knowledge and expertise on smart and flexible power grids of the future. ISGAN's national experts come from 26 countries and include engineers, scientists, and industry and policy leaders and decision makers. In collaboration with the International Energy Agency (IEA), ISGAN is committed to identifying advanced technologies and operational concepts. Within thematically clustered working groups, international knowledge exchange is promoted and coordination between stakeholders is facilitated. RWTH participates with ACS and IAEW in working group 6 "Power Transmission & Distribution Systems".

Gonca Gürses-Tran could successfully defend her dissertation about "Machine learning techniques for time series forecasting in power systems operation".

ACS is hosting a Unikernel community meeting with presentations on "Unikernerls in the wild". The event is scheduled for Friday, 07/07/2023 at the ERC building. Registrations are open until 01.06.2023. Further information below.

Milica Bogdanovic could successfully defend her dissertation about "Towards model partitioning automation of distributed real-time power systems simulations of distribution networks".

Edoardo de Din could successfully defend his dissertation about "Multi-Timescale Framework for the Voltage Control of Active Distribution Grids".

Roy Gaurav could successfully defend his dissertation about "Automation architectures for hybrid ac-dc grid".

Dr. Ilka Jahn has been accepted as a member of the Junges Kolleg of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts. The Academy, in cooperation with the Humboldtⁿ sustainability initiative, offers young researchers and artists the opportunity for free research and interdisciplinary dialogue. A special focus of the Junge Kollegs from 2023 onwards will be the working group "Sustainability".

Erdem Gümrükcü participated in the 1^st General Assembly of the FLOW project that was co-hosted by the EnelXWay and ARETI in Rome.

The ACS invites you to the ACS Student Event. Research projects, open HiWi positions and theses of the institute will be presented. This year the event will take place again in presence on January 23, 2023 from 15:30 at the E.ON Energy Research Center, Mathieustr. 10 room 24.

A software paper introducing datafev framework has been published in Elsevier Software Impacts. datafev is an open-source Python framework for developing and testing management strategies for electric vehicle  charging. This framework will be used in WP4 of the FLOW project.

A research article titled 'Hybrid Dynamic Phasor Modeling Approaches for Accurate Closed-Loop Simulation of Power Converters' has been published in 'IEEE Access' journal. It is an open access paper downloadable from the following link.

2022 Transformation Readiness Study

Anica Frehn could successfully defend her dissertation about "Under voltage ride through tests on nacelle test benches equippedwith a power hardware in the loop setup".

Dr. Ilka Jahn, as one of seven New Generation Network members, has received the "NGN Award 2022" for outstanding contributions of young members to CIGRE activities. Dr. Jahn is secretary of CIGRE working group B4.85 (Interoperability in HVDC systems based on partially open-source software). To the right Michel Augonnet, CIGRE President.

Erdem Gümrükcü represented ACS in the kickoff meeting of the FLOW project that was hosted by the Catalonia Institute for Energy Research (IREC) in Barcelona.

The E.ON Energy Research Center is supporting the Archimedes Sandbox this year. The participating children, were already at the E.ON ERC and could get an insight into the research. On 7.7. a wind farm model will also be presented for all interested parties as part of the FutureLab.

On 16-17 June, the final event of the H2020 project CoordiNet took place. Gonca Gürses-Tran participated in the hybrid event which attracted audience from research, industry and regulatory in Brussels.

The project coordination led by ENEL announced: “The coming CoordiNet Roadmap will show how flexibility may become more economically efficient for occasional congestion management than reinforcing the grid”.

Prof. Antonello Monti was awarded the 2022 Innovation Award of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia for his research on the IoT platform SOGNO (Service Oriented Grid for the Network of the Future). The SOGNO software platform provides distribution grid operators with improved control, through which better usability and optimization of energy sources are to be achieved. 

Innovation Minister Prof. Dr. Andreas Pinkwart emphasized: "Business and society have set themselves ambitious goals: By 2045, we want to have a climate-neutral economy in North Rhine-Westphalia. To ensure that this transformation succeeds, we are shifting towards a more sustainable energy supply based on renewables. This poses huge challenges for electricity distribution networks. Prof. Monti and his team have developed a platform to make better use of the capacities of existing grids thus supporting the expansion of renewables. Such innovative solutions can facilitate Germany's energy transition and boost acceptance among citizens."

Sriram Karthik Gurumurthy represented ACS in the TWINECS project meeting held in Barcelona, Spain on the 16^th and 17^th of May 2022. The meeting was hosted by UPC. The current status of the project and next steps towards Multi-physics simulations were discussed.

The OneNet General Assembly in 2022, took place on 12-13.05 in a hybrid model and was hosted by ACS in E.ON ERC, Aachen. Maliheh Haghgoo, Sonja Happ, and Iveliva Stoyanova represented ACS at the meeting. The topic of the meeting was heavily focused on the implementation of each demonstration.

Chief Engineer Bettina Schäfer was one of 7 RWTH executives to receive the "FAMOS for Family" award for family-friendly management style. In 2017, Prof. Antonello Monti had already received the award.

The consortium of the ectoControl 2.0 research project held a project meeting in Malmö from 05.04.2022 - 08.04.2022, which included a local pilot site visit of the research performed during the project.
Project ectoControl 2.0 is based on the partnership agreement between RWTH Aachen University and E.ON.
It researches modern control algorithms for bi-directional low-temperature district heating and cooling grids.
Based on the ectogrid™ pilot system "Medicon Village" in the southern Swedish city of Lund, ACS and E.ON are jointly developing holistic optimization methods as well as sector-coupled operation and control strategies for such low-temperature grids.

For further information on the E.ON ectogrid™ technology, please see the web link below.

General Assembly Meeting #5 took place on 30.03.2022.
Advisory Board Meeting #2 took place on 31.03.2022.

Deliverables submitted to EC end February 2022:
D2.2 "PlatOne Platform requirements and reference architecture (v2)"
D4.3 "Algorithm for ancillary services"
D5.5 "Use Case 2 Demonstration Report"
D9.5 "Project Management Plan Version 3"

At the ACS student event, the research of the institute, HiWi jobs and theses offerings are presented. It takes place on 25th January 2022 from 11:00 to 12:30 via Zoom.

CoordiNet held its General Assembly on January 14 2022 online. The focus of the discussion was put on the management of tasks in WP6: Markets design and platform, lessons learned. In a next step with a final data collection ex-post evaluation of the demonstrations are conducted by means of KPI analyses to which ACS is contributing. Finally, ACS support to identify a roadmap towards a new market design including the implementation standardized products for grid services. This roadmap will be a result of project analyses, stakeholder interviews and the learning of the CoordiNet demonstrations. Furthermore, Gender Balance and Diversity is an important topic for the CoordiNet consortium. For this, in 2021, ENEL has organized a Diversity Management Conference.

An article on "Optimal Management for Megawatt Level Electric Vehicle Charging Stations with a Grid Interface Based on Modular Multilevel Converter" has been published in "IEEE Access". The article is available for open access.

On Monday, December 20th 2021 at 11:00 the public presentation of the dissertation of Abhinav Sadu with the title "Towards resilient design of distribution grid automation and intended failures" will take place via Zoom. Afterwards, he will defend his dissertation.

The paper "Experimental measurement of frequency-dependent component impedances of grid-forming inverters in islanded microgrids", co-authored by Prof. Antonello Monti and Sriram Gurumurthy received the Best Paper Award of the IEEE PES ISGT-Europe 2021 conference.

In October 2021, Clara Köhnen (IAEW at RWTH Aachen University) and Gonca Gürses-Tran (ACS) were appointed to national experts representing Germany in ISGAN Annex 6: Power Transmission & Distribution Systems. On 09.11.2021, the RWTH project plan to bring the ISGAN Annex 6 into exchange with national TSO-VNB projects and to highlight common challenges and opportunities was presented. Through regular meetings with the task force, the perspective from Germany is brought into the current work program of the iea and thus into the exchange of the committed international experts. 

H2020 project I-NERGY released an open call. The open call addresses SMEs and startups developing artificial  intelligence algorithms and services applicable to the energy sector. Applicants can receive 50.000€ of funding under this programme.

BD4NRG held its second plenary meeting on 26th and 27th October. The two-day assembly was held entirely online, with all 35 project partners attending. The first day, focusing on the 12 Large-Scale Pilots, saw them presenting their use cases as well as their status going into the coming pre-pilot phase. On day 2, the BD4NRG Reference Architecture developed by ACS-led Work Package 2 was presented, followed by discussions on progress and next steps for the technical Work Packages 3, 4 and 5 in particular.

IEEE SmartGridComm 2021 will be hosted by ACS at the E.ON Energy Research Center from 25 - 28 October 2021. This year it will be held in a hybrid format, so guests can join the event in person or virtually.

An article on „Optimal load management strategy for large electric vehicle charging stations with undersized charger clusters” has been published in “IET Electrical Systems in Transportation”. This work is the main output of the joint research conducted by SINTEF Energy Research and ACS under MoMeWEC project. The article is available for open access at the link.

Dr. rer. nat. Stefan Lankes (ACS) and Dr. rer. nat. Sebastian Staacks (2nd Institute of Physics A) were awarded with the RWTH Lecturer 2021 certificate. The honor will take place on 18.11.2021 at the digitally conducted "Talk Lehre".

Platone reached the half-way point of its 4-year duration.
MS9 " All activities allow for all use case field testing " was reached by the German demo.
The following deliverables were submitted:
D1.3 Overview of regulatory aspects that impact the solutions tested in the demos in European countries
D5.4 Use Case 1 Demonstration Report
D6.5 Periodic report on lessons-learned (v2)
D7.3 CBA methodology
D8.3 High quality videos explaining the approaches in the 3 trials
D8.4 Intermediate report on the stakeholders engagement, exploitation, dissemination, communication and standardization activities
D8.5 Exploitation and Marketing Plan for the involvement of partners and future customers (v1)

The 1st Periodic Report was accepted by the EC and the result of the 1st Periodic Review is that the project implementation is satisfactory.

Prof. Laith Shalalfeh, of the German Jordanian University in Amman (Jordan) has been welcomed at ACS by Prof. Ponci and Mrs. Nouti. Prof. Shalalfeh will spend a two month period in Aachen working with ACS colleagues on the project “Frequency dynamics of low inertia power grid”, sponsored by DFG Grant to Support the Initiation of International Collaboration N. PO 1710/3-1. The whole team is looking forward to the technical, academic and cultural exchanges that this long awaited visit will bring.

The last FEIN e.V. Colloquium with Artur Löwen and Tim Schlösser from Gridhound GmbH took place on 02.07.2021. Further information can be found on the FEIN e.V. website.

LEGOS was mentioned on Hackaday.

Stefan Dähling has now successfully defended his dissertation "Cloud-based Multi-Agent Systems for Flexibility Management in Future Distribution Grids" before the examiners Prof. Antonello Monti and Prof. Dr. Andrea Benigni (FZ Jülich).

Erdem Gümrükcü gave a presentation on „Energy Management for Large Electric Vehicle Charging Stations” in Aachener Fachsymposium Straßenwesen 2021 - "Smart Infrastucture". The symposium is organized by the research association SETAC, which promotes and conducts the scientific exchange of ideas in the fields of road planning and design, earthworks and road construction, road operation and traffic engineering (traffic and operation), and tunnel construction and operation. More Information is found at the link.

As part of the MEISTER project, the publication "Power Quality Improvement in Distribution Grids via Real-Time Smart Exploitation of Electric Vehicles" was published, which can be found at the link.

Under the framework of the EU Horizon 2020 “MEISTER” project, ACS and the project partners (E.ON, Netze Schleswig Holstein AG, and CERTH) created a real-time monitoring infrastructure to capture the states of electric vehicle chargers; and accordingly managed the available electric vehicles as a potential source of energy in the need of one or more flexibility services demanded by the low voltage distribution system operator. In this regard, some results regarding the smart exploitation of the electric vehicles for power quality improvement of the distribution system (in terms of system voltage support, bidirectional power flow management, harmonic alleviation and power factor control) are found at the link.