EU – NOBEL

Overall Scope

Key Information

Full Name: Neighbourhood Oriented Brokerage Electricity and monitoring system

Runs from: Feb. 2010 – August 2012 (30)

Website(s): http://www.ict-nobel.eu/

Summary

The NOBEL project will build an energy brokerage system with which individual energy consumers can communicate their energy needs directly with both large-scale and small-scale energy producers, thereby making energy use more efficient. We have set an ambitious goal: based on previous studies, we expect our brokerage system to achieve a 30% reduction in energy consumption. The brokerage system will use a middleware system to communicate relevant data and IPv6 technology to interconnect the middleware with sensors and energy meters on individual devices.

The key to NOBEL’s efficiency improvement is that users become sources of both energy and information. The information allows the energy system to better adapt the amount of electricity in the network to the real time demand. The performance of the entire system is enhanced by exploiting the locality of the processes in monitoring and control that normally do not consider the detailed behaviour of the actual consumers.

Objectives

• Information retrieval. NOBEL uses state of the art technologies to dynamically obtain and process information from current available installed equipment. This will be achieved by implementing bidirectional communication with all involved entities, process the information with respect to consumption and production and automate decisions to be made network-wide.
• Information distribution. NOBEL develops a service oriented framework that will allow easy flow of information among the prosumers and the enterprise systems in order to foster more energy efficient processes. This implies the development/extension of a middleware – i.e. a set of application independent services – that enable the distributed capturing, filtering and processing of the energy related data. The same services will ease enterprise wide inclusion and allow for better cross-layer collaboration which will lead to holistic optimisation strategies.
• A cooperative system. NOBEL develops cooperation approaches for all entities involved. This assumes cooperating objects at device level, at the energy brokerage system, at service level etc. We plan to tackle interoperability in heterogeneous environments and use the Internet Protocol for communication e.g. at smart meters, etc- in order to reach unprecedented levels of granularity.

Highlights

In existing approaches electricity is distributed to the final users according to its expected estimated demand, usually precomputed yearly. Such non-dynamic approaches, are difficult to evolve and cannot accommodate changes in the system e.g. on production side, on consumer side etc. By having a cross-layer and open information flow among the different actors involved we can make better and more timely predictions, and inject new dynamics in the system (e.g. locality of energy production, direct interaction of business processes with the energy management systems etc) that can eventually lead to better energy management and achieve better energy savings.

NOBEL will focus its efforts in designing a new Neighbourhood Oriented Energy Monitoring and Control System. This solution will help network operators to improve last mile energy distribution efficiency by integrating operators’ requirements and by enabling bidirectional interaction between them. The NOBEL approach opens possibilities of the future open energy market, enabling not only the monitoring of the energy consumed by users, but also the monitoring of the energy produced i.e. implementing in real life the concept of “prosumer”, producer+consumer.

The project counts with with some of the most relevant actors in IPv6, cooperative objects – SICS and University of Duisburg (UDE), and offers the opportunity to deploy state of the art ICT in a large scale scenario: a network (smart grid) of 5.700 smart meters.

R&D Scope

NOBEL’s real-time monitoring and optimization of energy consumption requires information from a large number of different embedded devices. These devices need to be able to communicate using a common communication standard. In the area of sensor networking, the adoption of IP as the layer 3 protocol to connect wireless sensors has been slowed down by the common belief that IP is too large to fit on a memory constrained device. SICS uIP embedded IP stack previously showed that IP was lightweight enough to be used even on the most memory constrained devices. uIP was later extended with fully certified IPv6 support, making it the smallest IPv6 Ready stack available. uIPv6 has a code size of 11.5 Kbytes and requires less than 2 Kbytes of RAM.

By using an IPv6-compliant protocol stack, the sensor network can be easily integrated into IPv6 networks and leverage existing tools, protocols, knowledge and networking infrastructure. The IP-enabled sensor network can be managed with existing or readily available tools. Knowledge of IP network management can be applied to the sensor network. Additionally, development and programming of the sensor network does not require learning new network protocols or paradigms. Recent work has shown that by using a power-saving MAC protocol in the sensor network, IP-based sensor networks are as power-efficient as sensor networks based on proprietary or specialized mechanisms. For embedded devices that communicate wirelessly, the power consumption of the radio has been a major and therefore standardization work within the 6LowPan group has reduced the header overhead of IPv6, thereby reducing part of the power consumption.

Before mainstream adoption of IPv6 for resource-constrained embedded devices some issues remain to be solved: the definition, implementation and standardization of suitable routing protocols as well as a suitable MAC layer.

NOBEL technology will be deployed in a large scenario for 6 months, involving 5.700 users in the village of Alginet (Spain). The deployment will not only affect to the smart grid infraestructure, but also to the public ligthing monitoring anc control system.

Expected Impact

In the area of ICT, technological leadership is frequently maintained by the groups of people that initially create a technology. Since the consortium counts with some of the most relevant actors in IPv6, cooperative objects – , SICS and UDE have together almost 50% of all European papers at the most prestigious sensor networking conference, ACM SenSys – and in general the Internet of things, acquiring and maintaining a strong leading position can significantly strengthen Europe’s position in the ICT-enabled energy efficiency sector. By providing fundamental technology to enable the vision of a neighbourhood oriented electricity brokerage system, the NOBEL project will help to establish a leading position.

In the future many devices including smart meters are expected to provide their functionality as a service over an event based infrastructure. Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS) is a protocol attempting to fully integrate devices with the web service world. DPWS defines a minimal set of implementation constraints to enable secure web service messaging, discovery, description, and eventing on resource-constrained devices. Defining profiles for energy measurements in NOBEL will be a contribution to this standard related activities.

In the same context, 6LowPAN is an acronym of “IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks”, and is the name of the working group in the Internet area of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). 6LowPAN has published RFC4944, which specifies how IPv6 packets are compressed and transmitted over a 802.15.4 link. This allows IPv6 to be used for a variety of low-power radio systems in a standardized way. As presented in previous sections, partners of the consortium are active in the respective standardisation groups and fora.

Last but not least, the IPSO Alliance has the objective to increase the base to support and supplement the IP on every device. The IPSO Alliance performs interoperability tests, document the use of new IP-based technologies, conduct marketing activities, and serve as an information repository for users seeking to understand the role of IP in networks of physical objects. The IPSO Alliance was founded by partners (SAP, SICS) of the NOBEL consortium and we expect NOBEL results to be of high interest for the IPSO Alliance.

As a consequence of the efficiency in energy consumption reduction and minimising of the lighting pollution and reduction of CO2 gas emission will be achieved, resulting in a notable improvement on quality of life for EU citizens. In addition, considering the current economical situation and the dependencies on energy resources, providing a tool for a better management and monitoring of the electricity injected in our local networks, as well as information tool for citizens, will help providing stability to the householders and service suppliers budget.

Involved Constituency

The NOBEL consortium is composed of a balanced team of complementary organisations including industrial partners and research centres, universities and embedded software developers in order to gather the necessary expertise required by the project.

Each organisation provides its unique expertise: research centres and universities contribute with their analysis, methodological and dissemination support and development work, the industrial companies bring into the group their knowledge and leadership in production and development of embedded tools, energy efficiency and business systems, and the embedded software and middleware developers contribute with their specific competences to make the NOBEL approach possible.

The consortium comprises 6 partners from 4 countries:

• ETRA INVESTIGACIÓN Y DESARROLLO S.A .(ES)
• SAP AG (DE)
• SWEDISH INSTITUTE OF COMPUTER SCIENCE (SE)
• COOPERATIVA ELÉCTRICA ALGINET (ES)
• CENTRE FOR RESEARCH AND TECHNOLOGY HELLAS (GR)
• UNIVERSITAET DUISBURG-ESSEN (DE)