Research Projects
Smart technologies for lifecycle performance (S-STEP)(2014-2016)
The S-STEP programme of FIMECC is positioned in the crossroads of these two significant megatrends: 1) the growing importance of industrial service business, and 2) the remarkable emergence of industrial internet or cyber-physical systems. The combination of these trends holds significant advantages for Finnish industries and export. However, before these opportunities can be realised, the problems related to the combination of these opportunities, related technology issues and scientific problems needs to be solved. This is the core of the S-STEP -program and it has a clear mission: S-STEP creates the industrial internet technology that enables superior services for the Finnish industry.
Names of the researchers: Tommi Karhela, Gerardo Santillán
More information:https://www.fimecc.com/content/s-step-smart-technologies-lifecycle-performance-0
Auction based smart district heating grid (2015-2016)
A district heating grid consists of hot water pipes which uses the waste heat from a power plant and supply the waste heat energy to the consumers for heating. The consumers are always looking for cheaper solutions. In the energy market there is an ongoing trend to to use the local solar thermal and green energy resources to reduce the fossil fuel emission. But, it is always challenging to add local solar/thermal devices at consumer premises without disrupting the overall operation of the district heating grid. Moreover, one important requirement is to propose solutions to incentivize customers to install their own local energy producing and storage devices. Studying these kind of system is complex due to its inherited distributed nature. In order to enable studying of grid behavior an auction based district heating system is proposed in [1][2]. In an auction based scenario, the consumers which produces energy using their own local energy resources are called ‘prosumers’. In this research these prosumers can take part in the auctions in a district heating grid at hourly epoch. The model of Kaskinen district is developed by VTT earlier is used for this work. Two different forms of the offer function linear[1], fuzzy[2] were proposed. These offer functions, based on the next hour predictions provide a commitment value for different price options. Since, such price options are not available currently for this kind of work, the fuzzy concept in [2] avoid the limitation of the concrete pricing model from the market and safely use fuzzy concepts. The results obtained in [1] and [2] provide satisfactory comparison between these two different cases with the baseline fixed price and no auctions. This work has been extended to make use of longer predictions and offer commitments for more than 1 hour, using a bigger plant model. For the model of grid Apros[3] is used. Fortum and VTT has collaborated with Aalto and developed a larger district heating plant model using the Järvenpää case studies and data. The project is the part CLIC innovation, EFEU/ For, current and future work we use this model to provide concrete results using the finite horizon auctions, optimizing the operation of the grid in a better way. Furthermore, there is a possibility to use more complex offer function and pricing models.
Names of the researchers: Kashif Gulzar
[1] K. Gulzar, S. Sierla, V. Vyatkin, N. Papakonstantinou, P. G. Flikkema and C. W. Yang, "An auction-based smart district heating grid," 2015 IEEE 20th Conference on Emerging Technologies & Factory Automation (ETFA), Luxembourg, 2015, pp. 1-8.
[2] C. W. Yang, K. Gulzar, S. Sierla and V. Vyatkin, "Fuzzy Logic Based Prosumer Agent in a Modular Smart Grid Prosumer Architecture," Trustcom/BigDataSE/ISPA, 2015 IEEE, Helsinki, 2015, pp. 261-268.
[3] http://www.apros.fi/en/apros_in_brief_2
[4] http://clicinnovation.fi/activity/efeu/