Proposed by CISCO and Telecom-ParisTech
Prof. Daniel Kofman; contact: daniel.kofman@telecom-paristech.fr
Dr. Jean-Pierre Vasseur, contact: jpv@cisco.com
General Context
Electricity companies are historical facing two major difficulties: on the one hand, the structure of the demand curb imposes large CAPEX investments in resources that are not used most of the time, and, on the other hand, the OPEX is high due to the lack of automation in several segments of their (electricity) networks. Many electricity companies have initiated modernization processes to cope with both issues.
Automation requires massively deployment of sensors and actuators at different levels of their networks and systems. The connectivity of these devices to aggregators and of the aggregators to the Information Systems requires specific network and services solutions.
Three approaches to better manage the demand curb are:
- To leverage the potential of local energy generation
- To gain knowledge and control on the customers appliances, through for example Internet of things like paradigms.
- To introduce storage.
Electrical vehicles will play a central role on future electric systems. It is well known today that a sustained growth of the park of electrical vehicles will create severe peaks of the load at specific times of the day. More interesting, electrical cars may be seen as a component of the solution instead of as an additional problem: their batteries could contribute to an efficient energy management through the deployment of distributed storage systems. Innovative architectures are being studied for the support of battery charging in different contexts and even while in movement. Those systems require specific and sophisticated inter-vehicular (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) networking capabilities beyond the state of the art.
The last element of the eco-system we would like to consider relates to smart cities, and in particular Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) that are as well based on massive deployment of sensors and actuators requiring specific networking and system architectures.
Topics of research
The proposed research activity will focus on the following main topics:
1. Identify use cases for the federation of smart grid systems, V2V and V2I communications and smart city systems, targeting an overall optimization of the electric network as well as the provision of advanced services to end users. The use cases will be used to validate the solution proposed in the rest of the study.
2. Defining the overall federation architecture so as to enable the efficient control of the smart grid, answering the requirements of the identified use cases.
3. Identify the required functionality for the specific gateways/routers introduced above and design part of it.
4. Evaluate qualitatively and quantitatively the structure of the traffic generated by the identified use cases (at network and application levels) and carry out a performance analysis of the proposed solutions.
Timeframe and Location
Duration: The extent of the position is for one year and may be extended for additional 6 months.
Starting Date: No earlier than December 1st 2012, preferably no later than March 1st 2013
Location: The candidate will closely collaborate with both CISCO and Telecom ParisTech colleagues. The research will be mainly conducted at Telecom ParisTech (Paris, France) and more specifically at LINCS premises (www.lincs.fr). Working visits will be organized at CISCO premises.
For further details, please contact us at the above addresses.}