European FP7 Project FINSENY
The second year of contribution to the FP7 project FINSENY (Future INternet for Smart ENergY), as part of the EU Commission Future Internet Public Private Partnership (FI-PPP) program, started in April 2012. FINSENY, with a consortium of more than 30 European partners from both the ICT and energy sectors, aims at making a significant contribution to shaping Europe’s future internet ICT for smart energy systems.
In ordert o define a functional architecture supporting all energy use cases identified during the first year of the project, all parallel work packages adopted the same strategy to describe their use cases. As a result, the work packages on ‘Distribution Networks’, ‘Microgrids’, ‘Smart Buildings’, ‘Electric Mobility’ and ‘Electronic Marketplace for Energy’ detailed their individual use cases, elaborating on the Smart Grid Architecture Model (SGAM) framework developed by the Smart Grid Coordination Group (CEN/CENELEC/ETSI).
The use cases were broken down into functions, a preliminary set of data and information models and components. These elements were mapped to the different layers, domains and levels, and were further specified in more detail to lead to a refinement of the previously derived ICT requirements.
Future Internet functionality to support applications in multiple sectors is defined by the core platform project FI-WARE (http://www.fi-ware.eu/). The service infrastructure provided by FI-WARE represents the foundation of ICT functionality which FINSENY builds upon. At the same time, FINSENY identifies energy-specific ICT requirements and functionalities that are not covered by FI-WARE because of their domain peculiarity and develops the required enablers.
In parallel to the development of architecture and ICT functionality the use cases are being supported by individual
experimentations. At our institute, we implement the use case ‘ICT-Enabled Demand Side Management’, defined by the work package on Electric Mobility, making use of our state-of-the-art real-time digital simulator (RTDS) for electrical grids. The experimental activity validates the concept of the use case, and highlights the arising need for control and supporting ICT.
For leveraging on the achievements of FINSENY, a second phase of the project was proposed, combining the results of
FINSENY and FI-WARE. The project’s target is to test and verify the developed concepts through several trials, addressing
a variety of envisaged use cases and scenarios of smart energy system applications requiring strong support by ICT technology.
The project results can be found on the official project homepage: http://www.fi-ppp-finseny.eu/. Under “Publications”, you can find a movie on FINSENY and the ACS contributions, filmed at the E.ON Energy Research Center.
This project was funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no. 285135.