EQUILY

ConvCAO research group of CERTH research center with its AGILE system, and is among the 4 winners of the innovation contest Intelligent Energy Management Challenge organized by the Swedish Energy Agency and Swedish Incubators & Science Park.

Description of the solution

Calculating the optimal decisions that will balance energy, user needs and grid operational requirements is by no means an easy task: as a matter of fact, extensive research and real-life experiments performed over the last decades have exhibited that demand responsive optimized actions requires modifying many times during the day the operating set-points, starting times of appliances, etc., in a very intelligent and delicate manner. Such intelligent and delicate real-time decisions need to take into account the complex interplay between many different factors such as building/equipment dynamics, user comfort and needs, occupancy schedules, weather conditions, grid status, etc. Things become way more complicated when local energy generation (renewable sources, spinning reserves etc.) and storage or, even more, when smart grid comes into the picture: in this case, the problem of optimal decisions that preserves all the aforementioned factors and interconnected sub systems becomes way more complicated as these decisions must make sure that they provide efficient Energy Management control strategies so as to fully exploit the use of Renewable Energy (RE) sources or to minimize operation when tariffs are expensive or there is a need for load shedding.

To overcome the above concerns, we intend to employ the “plug-n-play” AGILE system that overcomes the above mentioned shortcomings. By embedding self-tuning capabilities the proposed “plug-n-play” system will intrinsically and during its operation, builds a model from collected data, and will use it to provide the optimal decisions. Moreover, it is computationally efficient being able to compute the optimal decisions very fast even when implemented in low-computing power computers. AGILE tool, is installed alongside with a sensor network in the aimed test case, and starts to operate without any previous calibration.

The main functionalities and benefits of our solution can be summarized as :

  • “Plug-n-Play” Intelligent Energy Management System.
  • Inter-operability and flexibility with any Test Case
  • Easy Upgrade
  • Low Cost Installation
  • User Friendly
  • Long-Term Operation
adminEQUILY