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.

Dr. David Raisz represented ACS with a poster and at a roundtable discussion at the statusworkshop of the project ENSURE in Aachen.

The flagship project "National 5G Energy Gub" officially began with the signing of the cooperation agreement on 19th of July. RWTH Aachen University, TU Dresden and the companies Ericsson and Deutsche Telekom now start the first of three phases of the large-scale project funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy.

Michael Diekerhof successfully defended his dissertation "Distributed Optimization for the Exploitation of Multi-Energy Flexibility under Uncertainty in City Districts".

Dr. Gianluca Lipari and Manuel Pitz attended the fourth NRG5 plenary project meeting. The meeting was organized in Ipswich by British Telecommunications.

Baptiste Feron successfully defended his dissertation "An optimally assessment methodology for Home Energy Management System approaches based on uncertainty analysis".

Stefan Dähling, Lukas Razik, Igor Sowa and Dr. David Raisz represented ACS at the joint Cluster2-Cluster3 meeting of ENSURE, in Berlin, from 04. to 06. July

Publications in the project eSafeNet:
-P. McKeever, E. De Din, A. Sadu and A. Monti, "MAS for automated black start of multi-microgrids," 2017 IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications (SmartGridComm), Dresden, 2017, pp. 32-37.
-De Din, Edoardo; Lipari, Gianluca; Angioni, Andrea; Ponci, Ferdinanda; Monti, Antonello; "Effect of the reporting rate of synchrophasor measurements for distributed secondary control of AC microgrid"; [2017 IEEE International Workshop on Measurements & Networking, M&N, 2017-09-27 - 2017-09-29, Naples, Italy]
-Edoardo De Din, Charukeshi Joglekar, Gianluca Lipari, Ferdinanda Ponci, Antonello Monti; “An Emergency Energy Management System for Microgrid Restoration after Blackout” submitted to IEEE Smart Energy Systems and Technology

The duration of the project has been extended by six extra months until 31.03.2019 with the existing financing.

Nikolaus Wirtz represented ACS in the DEFENDER project meeting in London, hosted by Venaka Media.

The 7th eSafeNet Consortium meeting took place in Mainz on 03.07.2018.

The Gridwatch device, developed by MAC, a company set in Ireland, measuring power quality indexes has been installed in RWTH premises in the context of ADMS project. Together with the ALTEA sensors, the locally developed "LOCO" PMU and the GridHound Cloud, the ADMS architecture is fully installed in the RWTH pilot site.

The 2nd SUCCESS open day took place with a public event in Bucharest on 28.06 and a visit to two of the three locations of the Romanian field trial (at Stalpu and Ploesti) on 29.06.

On June 27th Ting Wang, representing ACS, presented a conference paper in the IEEE 9th International Symposium on Power Electronics for Distributed Generation (PEDG) in Charlotte, USA.

The presentation based on the work in P4 of Flexible Electrical Networks project described the challenges of protection of DAB converter in the MVDC netowrks and proposed a new protection method in the session on “Dual Active Bridge Based Systems”.

A new paper about "Probabilistic Forecasting of Household Electrical Load Using Artificial Neural Networks" presented in IEEE PMAPS conference in Boise, USA by Baptiste Feron. The paper can be found at the link.

Lin Zhu successfully defended her disseration "Modeling, Control and Hardware in the Loop in Medium Voltage DC Shipboard Power System".

On June 19th Dr. Gianluca Lipari, representing ACS, presented three of the flagship projects running at the Institute for Automation of Complex Power Systems. The work done in the scope of SUCCESS, RESERVE and SOGNO projects was described, highlighting how Smart Energy grids may gain benefits from 5G, during the special session on “Unlocking the 5G potential for smart energy grids”, organized by the NRG5 project, at the EuCNC 2018 conference in Ljubljana.

​​A new paper about "Domestic Battery and Power-to-Heat Storage for Self-Consumption and Provision of Primary Control Reserve" was presented in IEEE PSCC conference in Dublin, Ireland by Baptiste Feron. The paper can be found at the link.

Dr. Gianluca Lipari and Padraic McKeever represented ACS in the SUCCESS Project meeting in Athens, hosted by Synelixis.

Andrea Angioni took part at the periodic meeting of H2020 ADMS project in Bologna, Italy. He discussed the current status of the pilot sites and the actions needed for the last trimester of the project.

The bridge data management working group met in Brussels for its yearly meeting in the beginning of June. Stephan Gross participated and represented the ELSA project and the E.ON ERC.

Professor Monti and Andrea Angioni participated in the Bologna Energy Day event (Italy), as part of the EU Sustainable Energy Week 2018. Prof. Monti presented the last trends in automation in distribution system based on cloud and 5G communication, while Andrea Angioni presented the status of the RWTH monitoring system based on PMUs and cloud. Furthermore Dr. Marco Pau and Jonas Bielemeier represented ACS in the SOGNO Project meeting hosted by University of Bologna and Altea.