Presenting the partners: ICCS

The FLEXGRID project coordinator, Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS), is a research organization associated with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA).

ICCS has rich experience in the development of advanced pricing mechanisms for the retail energy market and energy storage management, ICT platforms that guarantee user engagement in energy efficiency related services, and aggregated demand response algorithms and respective data analytics for flexibility services that facilitate the active participation of small energy prosumers in liberalized energy markets.

ICCS’s role in FLEXGRID

In the context of FLEXGRID, ICCS will:

• Lead the project management activities (WP1) exploiting the scientific, technical, organizational and financial management expertise of the involved ICCS staff in Horizon 2020 Research & Innovation projects.
• Co-chair the Technical Management Team (TMT) and have a leading role in the definition of FLEXGRID research methodology (i.e. advanced mathematical modelling and algorithms) as well as the definition of FLEXGRID use cases, operational scenarios and requirements’ analysis per FLEXGRID subsystem and user.
• Lead the research activities on the design, development and performance evaluation of innovative Business-to-Consumer (B2C) flexibility markets that are run by and aggregator or retailer market stakeholder (WP3).
• Participate actively in the design of the modular FLEXGRID architecture and software data models (WP2 and WP6).
• Highly evolve its existing advanced pricing and aggregated demand response & energy storage system (ESS) management algorithms in order to constitute them able to optimize energy service provider’s (ESP) innovative business models (WP4).
• Highly evolve its existing renewable energy sources (RES) and ESS sizing and management algorithms in order to constitute them able to mitigate market power for profit seeking stakeholders and interact with underlying network (OPF) and dynamic markets (WP5).
• Play a key role in the dissemination and exploitation strategy of FLEXGRID by focusing on the commercial exploitation of energy services of FLEXGRID platform in collaboration with other partners.

FLEXGRID will play a very important role to evolve and experiment with ICCS existing software toolkits and services to constitute it more complete, intelligent and able to act as a service to a more complex platform such as FLEXGRID Automated Trading Platform (ATP), developed by project partner ETRA. It is our aim to found a spin-off company towards this goal, says Dr. Prodromos Makris, senior researcher at NTUA.

Opportunity for graduate students

ICCS will also exploit the research that will be carried out through FLEXGRID in order to embed the findings of the project in (post-)graduate courses.

In this way, graduate students will have the opportunity to learn technologies relevant with new energy market architectures and algorithms for the development of advanced retail pricing and flexibility aggregation algorithms, bi-level optimization models for efficient energy markets’ and networks’ interaction, and optimal power flow and advanced energy market clearing models, explains Dr. Makris.

In addition, FLEXGRID will highly enforce the research that Ph.D. students in NTUA perform through its exploitation for the statement of new research problems that are vital for the industry and the research community in such a rising topic like novel energy market architectures and flexibility services’ provisioning in high RES penetration contexts.

Exploitation and impact

After the FLEXGRID project lifetime, ICCS hopes to achieve several exploitation goals. First of all, the Automated Flexibility Aggregation Toolkit (AFAT) developed in the project will be made publicly available for use of its basic functionalities.

Secondly, ICCS aims to continuously enhance the AFAT’s functionalities based on the feedback from many stakeholders, reviewers and business consultants towards releasing an improved software version.

We will continue efforts for integrating AFAT and respective functionalities to a real commercial software platform dealing with energy flexibility provisioning issues and we will explore the opportunity of integrating AFAT in a well-known research infrastructure (national or EU level) towards evolving the platform to an ‘experimentation hub’ for researchers, notes Dr. Makris.

Furthermore, ICCS will explore the opportunities to exploit the AFAT as a ‘plug-in’ module to existing products of various stakeholders as well as successful Horizon 2020 projects.