The Special Session proposals on "DC Shipboard Power Systems for the future All Electric Ships" and "Smart Automation, Control and ICT Concepts applied to Power and Energy Systems" by Macro Cupelli were accepted for IECON 2018.

The kick-off meeting of the H2020 project SOGNO was held in Aachen. Prof. Monti, Marco Pau, Gaurav Roy, Jonas Bielemeier and Manyun Huang represented ACS at the meeting. The project deals with the use of 5G communication and cloud services for the automation of future distribution grids. ACS has the role of technical manager for the project.

At the ENSURE CLUSTER 3-Meeting in Oldenburg ACS was represented by Stefan Dähling (who leads the „Co-simulation" working group 3.1.2), Igor Sowa (contributes to AP.3.2 with collaborative optimization strategies in an aggregator), Lukas Razik (working in AP.3.1 „ICT related solutions") and David Raisz (responsible for milestone M3.2.1 „Concepts of System Operation and Automation" and contributing to AP 3.4 „Stability aspects"). Our results and plans for future works were appreciated by our partners.

On December 15th at 16:00 the information event for third semester students of the faculty for electrical engineering and information technology takes place in the seminar room 00.24. This information event helps to decide on a specialization.

On December 8th, the Day of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology takes place. There, Dr.-Ing. Mohsen Ferdowsi (Alumni of ACS) is awarded with the STAWAG Disserations Prize 2017. Further information is published at the link.

At the beginning of January, in the context of the ADMS H2020 EU project, we will start to install and test six Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) developed during 2017 by ACS Institute. The PMU will be connected to the Medium Voltage current and voltage sensors developed by ALTEA company and will continuously send measurements to a cloud monitoring system developed by GridHound.

The EU project "FISMEP - FIWARE for Smart Energy Platform" has started. It draws on the results of the EU project FINESCE and will further advance its platform concept by designing and adding new services to increase the flexibility of energy systems. Under the coordination of RWTH Aachen University, a total of seven research an industrial partners from Germany, Sweden and Romania are jointly working on the project. The Field Test Germany will be led by the ACS, in close collaboration with Flexible Electrical Networks FEN Research Campus. Further information is published at the link.

Stephan Groß and Maliheh Haghgoo participated at FIWARE Tech Summit 2017 which was held in Málaga on the 28th and 29th of November. It is an event specifically dedicated to technological and business development and gathering leading developers, startups, corporates and entrepreneurs from the worlds of Open Source, Smart Cities, Smart Industry, Smart Agrifood, and Internet of Things, to share experiences, discover new business opportunities, and to co-create the future. Further information is published at the link.

Workshop Protection Concepts LVDC will be held at 10 o'clock on 27. November in the office of Forschungscampus FEN, Aachen. Wilbert Tarnate and Ting Wang from ACS will present about the topic LVDC protection.

The INTERFLEX project represented by Marco Cupelli participated in the H2020 Bridge Data Management Working Group meeting in Brussels. The group worked on the topic characterization of flexibility services and data handling restrictions.

The ELSA project represented by Stephan Gross participated in the H2020 Bridge Data Management Working Group meeting in Brussels. The group worked on the topic characterization of flexibility services and data handling restrictions.

There is a lot of interest and activity in the area of using distributed renewable energy sources to support recovery from blackouts and island operation of microgrids. The event "Stromausfall - Versorgungssicherheit im Inselnetzbetrieb mit dezentraler Einspeisung" (Power Failure - Security of supply in stand-alone grid operation with decentralized feed-in) organised by Bayern Innovativ was attended by ACS. Further information is published at the link.

At May 25, 2018, the 6th ROME workshop on runtime and operating systems for the many-core era takes place in Vancouver, Canada. Stefan Lankes (ACS) is organizer of the workshop. Further information is published at the link.

The IEEE SmartGridComm takes place in Dresden from October 23 to October 26 2017. On October 24, Padraic Mckeever, Edoardo De Din, Abhinav Sadu and Antonello Monti from ACS present the paper: "MAS for Automated Black Start of Multi-Microgrids". It relates to two research projects at ACS. It describes the general approach taken in the ACS field trial, as well as first results showing simultaneous reconnection of several inverters to a de-energised grid, where the inverters simultaneously perform operater in grid forming mode to re-energise the microgrid and feed the loads. Further information is published at the link.

The 5th eSafeNet Consortium Meeting was hosted at ACS on October 17th. eSafeNet is studying dedicated communications for Smart Grids. ACS demonstrated the current state of the work being carried out for recovery from blackout using novel inverter control and a multi-agent system to add intelligence.

The next SUCCESS consortium meeting will take place in Cork, Ireland, on 12th-13th October. The hosts will be the ESB, the Irish electrical utility operator.

The 4th consortium meeting of RESERVE will be hosted in Cork, Ireland on the 10th and 11th October 2017. ACS will be represented by Marco Cupelli, Markus Mirz, Sriram Gurumurthy, Aysar Musa and Antonello Monti.

ACS, represented by Nikolaus Wirtz attended the DEFENDER plenary meeting in Terni, hosted by ASM Terni S.p.A.

Researchers link ten simulators for a transatlantic realtime simulation. The demo took place in the Idaho National Lab, USA on 29.09.2017. Steffen Vogel from ACS visited the demo and Prof. Antonello Monti headed a related live-workshop at ISGT.

Dr. Marco Pau received the RWTH Start-Up grant for the project "SMART PLUS - SMART PLacement of MeasUrementS in distribution grids"; the grant funds post-docs and Junior professors for the development of innovative research projects and is aimed to support their scientific independency.

Lukas Razik participated at the D-A-CH+ Energieinformatik 2017 Conference (October 5-6 2017) in Lugano, Switzerland and presented the paper: Automated deserializer generation from CIM ontologies: CIM++—an easy-to-use and automated adaptable open-source library for object deserialization in C++ from documents based on user-specified UML models following the Common Information Model (CIM) standards for the energy sector

SUCCESS will have a booth at the European Utility Week in Amsterdam, 3rd-5th October.

On the days 27-28 September, Prof. Monti, Prof. Ponci and other ACS research assistants participated to the meeting of the H2020 project ADMS. During this meeting some demontrations on the use of low cost PMU and cloud based monitoring system were held.

At ISGT Europe 2017 Conference in Torino, Italy, three ACS papers were presented: Sonja Kolen presented the publication "Swarm Behavior for Distribution Grid Control", Aysar Musa presented the publication "Modeling and Design of Hybrid Distribution Network: Operational and Technical Features", and the student Erdem Gümrükcü presented the publication "Modular Modeling Concept and Multi-Domain Simulation for Smart Cities".

Flexmeter activities were presented in Turin during the IEEE Internation Conference on Innovative Smart Grid Technologies (ISGT Europe). Marco Pau represented ACS at the Workshop.

ACS, represented by Gianluca Lipari and Manuel Pitz, attended the second NRG5 project meeting in Athens, hosted by TEISTE - Technological Education Institute of Sterea Ellada.

Baptiste Feron and Hassan Harb attended the final colloquium for photovolotaics in Berlin, in the frame of the Project PV CHP.

On the days 20-22 September, Andrea Angioni from ACS participated to the IEEE International Workshop on Applied Measurements for Power Systems. He presented a paper on a “Low Cost PMU to monitor distribution grids”. The workshop was a good opportunity for idea exchange and updates in the world of electrical measurements.

After a second on-site check with the project partner Bouygues, 5 of 6 batteries at the Aachen trial site are operational and are tested in order to provide flexibility to the office building district at the EON ERC.

8th LV steering committee meeting is is held in FEN office, Aachen.

On September 18th and 19th ACS hosted the ETIP SNET Region Workshop. https://www.etip-snet.eu/

Antonello Monti und Baptiste Feron vom ACS haben das Paper "An agent based approach for Virtual Power Plant valuing thermal flexibility in energy markets" veröffentlicht. Weitere Informationen sind unter dem Link zu finden.

Prof. Monti, Michael Diekerhof and Nikolaus Wirtz attended the ELSA Board meeting in Brussels.

E.ON ERC hosted the Cluster 3 joint meeting from 26 to 27 July. Shortly before this, ACS hosted two preliminary workshops (for contributors in work packages 3.1 and 3.4 respectively). ACS was represented by Stefan Dähling, David Raisz and Igor Sowa.

ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) launched a new group on Context Information Management for smart city interoperability. The ACS (Stephan Gross) joined the first workshop on Cross-Cutting Context Information Management in Berlin.

Several Work packages of the H2020 project DEFENDER met in Ljubljana for concrete elaboration of research activities across partners. A visit at ELES (one of the pilot site owners) regional control room and substation facilities supported the discussions. For ACS, Nikolaus Wirtz and Bettina Schäfer were participating.

On July 5th, industrial and academic partners participated in the first medium voltage consortium Workshop to discuss the results of the work achieved and define future directions for cooperation in research and development activities both industry and university.

7th LV steering committee meeting was hold in FEN office, Aachen. ACS (Ting, Wang) presented the research progress in the field of influencing factors of LVDC protection.

The 7th Steering Committee Meeting of FEN Low Voltage took place on RWTH Campus. Current developments and roadmap proposal were presented, engaging the industry consortium in the roadmap development.

On the 30th of June 2017 Mohsen Ferdowsi doctorated at ACS with the dissertation "Data-Driven Approaches for Monitoring of Distribution Grids".

The 5G-PPP phase 2 project NRG-5 held the kick-off meeting in Rome. Gianluca Lipari participated for ACS. The NRG-5 project aims to contribute to the 5G PPP/5G Initiative research and development activities, by delivering a novel 5G-PPP compliant, decentralized, secure and resilient framework, with highly availability, able to homogeneously model and virtualize multi-homed, static or moving, hardware constrained (smart energy) devices, edge computing resources and elastic virtualized services over communications’ and energy utilities’ infrastructures.

ACS, represented by Prof. Monti, Gianluca Lipari and Padraic McKeever, joined the SUCCESS project meeting and first Advisory Board meeting in Stockholm, hosted by KTH - Royale Institute of Technology.

Professor Antonello Monti was awarded the "IEEE Innovation in Societal Infrastructure Award 2017". Further information is published at the link.

ACS hosted the first review of the SUCCESS project. Prof. Monti, as technical manager, Gianluca Lipari and Padraic McKeever represented ACS, presenting the results of the project obtained so far and demonstrating the SUCCESS Security Monitoring Architecture and the developed security and resiliency solutions in the ACS laboratory.

The “Energie System 2050” project of the Helmholtz Association met in Berlin for their yearly workshop of all working groups. Marcus Fuchs (EBS) and Stephan Gross (ACS) presented their work on work package 5.2 and 5.4. More information about the “Energie System 2050” can be found on their website.

Professor Antonello Monti is one of seven RWTH managers who were awarded "FAMOS für Familie" for their family-friendly management. On prize-giving he was represented by Sara Khayyamim.

ACS at the Fraunhofer IoT Innovation and Networking Days in Bonn. ACS, represented by Gianluca Lipari, joined the Fraunhofer IoT Innovation and Networking Days, presented the vision and the first results of the H2020 Project SUCCESS.

The H2020 project DEFENDER held the kick-off meeting in Rome. Bettina Schäfer participated for ACS. DEFENDER (Defining the European Energy Infrastructures) is aiming at protection and security of critical energy infrastructures.

Stephan Gross participated for ACS in a meeting of the Smart Grid Plus ERA-Net initiative. The goal of the meeting was to establish a collaboration between Funding Programs, Providers of Data and Service Platform hosts.

ACS, represented by Marco Pau, hosted the M29 Flexmeter project meeting at the E.On ERC.