GID

System Architecture

Overview

Gid-MicroRede is operating in the scope of ITEA2 project SEAS - Smart Energy Aware Systems (ITEA project 12004). SEAS involves 35 partners from 7 countries (Belgium, Finland, France, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and Turkey) and is led by GDFSUEZ. The Portuguese consortium involves ISEP/IPP – GECAD, ISA, and Evoleo Technologies. Zita Vale and Isabel Praça, from ISEP/IPP – GECAD are members of the SEAS Project Coordination Committee - PCC.

The SEAS project addresses the problem of inefficient and unsustainable energy consumption, which is due to a lack of sufficient means to control, monitor, estimate and adapt energy usage of systems versus the dynamic usage situations and circumstances influencing the energy usage. Current energy, automation and ICT systems provide only rather static and coarse means to control, monitor and estimate energy consumption at the consumption sites, which leads to energy wasting in buildings (e.g. non-optimal heating/cooling) and hinders deployment of highly fluctuating renewable energy generation. Additional problem is that energy consumption related information is scattered in many standards and there is no convenient means to build solutions that require interworking and energy information exchange between the standards and related industries. Also providing new services as part of energy contracts and enabling micro-grid environments in liberalized energy market contexts lacks system and process solutions.

SEAS project objective is to enable interworking of energy, ICT and automation systems at consumption sites, and to introduce dynamic and fine grained ICT -based solutions to control, monitor and estimate energy consumption. Additional aim is to explore business models and solutions that will enable energy market participants to incorporate micro-grid environments and active customers. The project objective includes introduction of new digital services enabling proactive adaptation of consumption behaviour to the changes in usage, energy costs, availability of energy sources and weather/climate/season, while making the stakeholders (e.g. utilities and consumers) aware of the changes and their impact. The new digital services from SEAS project will be aimed for the building and micro-grid environments, and for their related stakeholders. SEAS project results will enable considerable increase in energy efficiency of buildings and facilitate deployment of renewable energy micro-grids, contributing towards meeting the environmental, economic and sustainability challenges of energy consumption. SEAS project’s approach is to increase semantic understanding of energy consumption related information and interdependencies between energy systems, automation systems and changing conditions present at consumption sites. The project will take existing energy information related standards and information models from different industrial sectors (e.g. CIM and BIM) as a starting point and develop new cross-industry knowledge model and cloud based information exchange platform, enabling advanced ICT based solutions for smart energy aware systems in building and micro-grid environments. In SEAS project smart energy aware system is defined as a system that is capable of adapting it’s behaviour, energy consumption or energy source via semi-automated or autonomous control that is based on semantic understanding of the system and it’s context.

The main goal of the SEAS project is to research, develop and demonstrate a new SEAS Knowledge Model and SEAS Information Exchange Platform for energy information representation, processing and exchange between energy systems, automation systems, ICT based digital services and all related stakeholders. The main goal includes development and demonstration of ICT -based solutions, which are based on the SEAS knowledge model and information exchange platform, validating the concept of smart energy aware systems in building and micro-grid environments. Due to SEAS project’s innovation on semantic energy information modelling and exchange, the main project results are applicable in large scale design, development, deployment and use of energy and automation systems present in building and micro-grid environments. For ensuring project impact the SEAS knowledge model will be published as reference model for open use and the SEAS information exchange platform as open cloud service. This approach ensures the impact, fast exploitation and availability of the project’s main results.

The SEAS project is organized in seven work packages according to the following figure. ISA leads task T3.4 – SEAS Smart Energy Aware Building Platform. ISEP/IPP-GECAD is the leader of WP4 – Smart Energy Aware Building – and Evoleo Technologies leads task T4.3 – Microgrid context awareness.

Work Packages