Context
Home/building automation enable advanced energy control applications both for residential users and enterprises. The benefits of these applications are even larger when deploying smart-grid systems at the neighborhood scale. Energy companies are analyzing the potential impact of these
applications on their business and on their infrastructure control and management systems which performances could be significantly enhanced. They evaluate the pertinence of deploying an “energy box” at customers’ premises (a device that will embed a smart meter and provide a broad set of advanced capabilities). The post-doc activities will contribute to an initiative being launched with one of the major energy companies worldwide.
The targeted system will enable end users to define their policies for energy management. Self-organization principles will be applied to enforce the policies. These energy applications require the autonomous discovery of the various appliances available in home and building environments (sources, storages and consumers of energy; remark: as an example a refrigerator capable of making ice during the low load hours to cool food during the high load hours is considered here as a storage capability), as well as other self-organization capabilities. The extension to smart-grid at neighborhood scale will be facilitated by a distributed control plane of the various clients’ environments. Cloud computing principles will also be applied to facilitate the management of the large amount of data that will be processed and one the key questions will be how to distribute the system intelligence among the various components, from cloud to things through the energy box.
A PhD. in Computer Engineering, Computer Science or Electrical Engineering, is required. A prior knowledge of energy systems, Internet of things principles, distributed systems, and/or data analysis would be an asset. Strong communications skills in English are also required.
Applicants should submit a cover letter, a resume, and the names of two references to both Profs. Kofman and Rosenberg via email daniel.kofman@telecom-paristech.fr and cath@ece.uwaterloo.ca. Please note
that  the topic line should start with Smartgrid-IoT POSTDOC.