Volume 52, Issue 2

In the last few years, driving forces like political legislation, an increased use of renewable energy sources and a growing ecological awareness resulted in an advanced integration of distributed energy resources in the public power grid. The resulting change towards a decentralised power supply is expected to further continue in the coming years and requires a reorganization of the conventional market structures in order to meet the challenges as well as to exploit the potentials resulting from the new situation. In the following work we present a reference architecture for regional electricity markets which addresses this very issue. Besides a description of the general market design, a more detailed view of selected market players is provided.

The German energy industry is rapidly changing and especially small and mid-sized companies are facing various challenges. Currently, there is no structured method to support business process management of these companies by means of a business process reference model. Therefore, within the project “Smart Watts” such a model is being developed for municipal utilities processes with end customer interaction.

The introduction of smart meter solutions — especially within the residential and commercial customer segment — will lead to new opportunities for customer interaction with the energy market and for boosting consumer awareness for electricity consumption. Both of them help to increase end user energy efficiency. Within the BMWi project E-Energy the E-DeMa consortium with the members RWE, Siemens, ef.ruhr, Stadtwerke Krefeld, Miele and ProSyst draws on the capabilities of current smart meter solutions and extends them to a future marketplace for all services and products around demand side management, flexible tariff structures or network services. The subscriber as prosumer (simultaneously producer and consumer) develops to become an active market player. The aim of this project is to create conditions for the efficient handling of energy resources.

Energy management and energy efficiency for small electricity customers as part of a Smart Grid strategy are gaining significance with increasing share of renewable and distributed generation. The concept presented provides a single Gateway between the customer and the grid on top of which a variety of applications shall be executable, which access costumer devices, user displays, smart meters, measuring data, pricing data etc.

Present day electric power systems in developed countries are characterised by very high reliability. In Germany the mean supply interruption time per year for the end customers is 23 minutes. How will this high quality of supply change with the increase of decentralised and renewable generation? Which measures are necessary to keep on this high reliability standard? This is one of the investigation goals in the E-Energy project Regenerative Modellregion Harz (RegModHarz). From a power system planning point of view it is possible to calculate some reliability indexes to evaluate the network structure. This methodology and some calculation examples will be given in part one of this paper. Further, taking into account the current experiences with power system operation, some necessary measures to support the secure power system operation with a high share of renewable generation, will be presented. The expected level of reliability in the future distribution power system will be analysed.

The aim of the research project MeRegio is to meet the claim for more efficient decentralized energy systems by integrating advanced information and communication technologies (ICT) into all stages of the energy supply chain. Several marketplaces — in particular for power and for ancillary services — which are coupled to the technical energy infrastructure through a powerful and lawful ICT infrastructure should serve as a basis for an efficient and transparent coordination of energy supply, energy demand, and services. The developed concepts will be both validated by simulations and tested within a model region.

The purpose of this paper is to show that information and communication technologies (ICT) play a central role in future energy supply systems. The paper at hand is concerned with legal use cases and practical problems regarding the so-called “Internet of Energy”. These issues are currently also under intense investigation within the framework of the interdisciplinary e-energy-program. The scenarios discussed in the paper are analysed in terms of their reconcilability with the prevailing law. Subsequently, the regulatory framework is interpreted and the need for legal adjustments is demonstrated.

The Innovative Retail Laboratory (IRL) is an application-oriented research laboratory of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) run in collaboration with the German retailer GLOBUS SB-Warenhaus Holding in St. Wendel. In this living lab, we conduct research in a wide range of different domains all connected to intelligent shopping consultants, which range from a virtual assistant responsible for matters of dieting and allergies, over a digital sommelier, to personalized cross and up selling, smart items with digital product memories as a further development of the RFID technology, indoor positioning and navigation as well as new logistics concepts, to see if they are suitable for everyday life and useful for customers. New ways of customer interaction are developed and tested for implementation. The range varies from personalized shopping assistants to “talking” products and intelligent shopping carts, which plan and show the way through the store according to your shopping list. Furthermore they can give advice on what to buy for the recipes you have in mind, they compare products, point out special offers in a personalized way and give additional information about the products. However, the concepts and technologies that regard the self-service store of the future as a place for shopping are not IRL´s only focus. The relation between the store and its customers begins way before the shopping trip itself takes place. It starts with an individual shopping preparation and a personalized presentation of offers at home and will be continued afterwards through advice that is given about purchased goods and information about their use.

Zusammenfassung Der gemeinsame Nenner der Informatik ist die Automatisierung von Abläufen, Analysen und Prozessen. In den vergangenen Jahrzehnten wurde viel auf dem Gebiet der Automatisierung fremder Domänen erreicht. Traditionell sind wir aber bei Automatisierung in unserer ureigenen Domäne, der Systementwicklung und -analyse, deutlich zurückhaltender. Das wirft die Frage auf, ob wir hier nicht viel mehr tun könnten und müssten. Ist zum Beispiel die manuelle Suche nach Lösungen gut spezifizierter Probleme angemessen? Wir diskutieren diese Frage am Beispiel verteilter Systeme mit Spezifikationen in temporalen oder Fixpunkt-Logiken wie LTL, ATL ∗ oder μ -Kalkülen, den natürlichen Spezifikationssprachen für nicht-terminierende (oder: reaktive) Systeme wie zum Beispiel Kommunikationsprotokolle.