UBITECH’s Eleni Fotopoulou gives an invited talk about the innovative ENTROPY IT ecosystem for improving energy efficiency through consumers’ engagement and behavioural changes, at the VIMSEN Industrial Workshop that takes place today in the OTE Academy building. The ENTROPY platform properly understands the main energy consuming factors and trends; formally represents, models and interprets the citizens’ behaviour and the potential for lifestyle changes; and supports behavioural change through motivation and awareness. To achieve this, the ENTROPY platform effectively combines (a) Internet of Things (capacity for interconnecting numerous devices and applying energy-efficient communication protocols); (b) Data Modelling and Analysis (semantic models and knowledge extraction mechanisms); and (c) Recommendation and Gamification (trigger interaction with relevant users in social networks, increase end users’ awareness, adopt energy efficient lifestyles and provide a set of energy efficient recommendations and motives). Ms. Fotopoulou presentation can be found here.
The VIMSEN initiative (http://www.ict-vimsen.eu) transforms the current centralized electricity market framework into a distributed one, introducing the concept of virtual micro-grid networks. Virtual micro-grids (VMGs) are associations of distributed energy generators and/or micro-grid networks that have agreed to operate on a common basis. VMGs provides flexibility to small or very small energy generators, since they can re-distribute energy resources with each other to compensate energy production-distribution, and they can directly participate in the electricity market through the respective association, which acts similarly as a big power generator unit. In particular, VIMSEN researches on (a) an intelligent data metering techniques suitable for the VMG distributed network, (b) information and decision making technologies for the dynamic VMG creation in a way to optimize the participants’ benefits and macro-grid perspectives, (c) a reliable communication infrastructure that permits Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning for data exchange in the VMG network, and (d) an active energy management and control tool for the operation of the virtual micro-grid as a common virtual power unit.
