Description

Colibri provides a platform for smart building energy management. Semantics about the building, the building automation systems, other energy-consuming or energy-producing devices, and the environment are used to elaborate optimization strategies. The decisions are propagated to the building automation systems in order to influence physical processes within the building. In addition, standardized communication with the smart grid should be enabled as energy management is intrinsically tied to the power grid.

In the context of demand response programs, smart grid agents, such as grid operators or energy retailers, can communicate with customers and their buildings to ensure grid stability and coordinate energy demand and supply. Examples are the distribution of price information by energy retailers, or the negotiation of energy savings between grid operator and customer. Also regulatory interventions of grid operators to limit energy and power consumption are possible scenarios. Within this project, an OpenADR connector should be implemented to establish a standardized smart grid connection point to the Colibri core. This connector should be able to interpret signals from smart grid agents and send outgoing signals to other agents in the smart grid. On the other hand, this connector needs to implement the Colibri interface specification. The resulting connector, which will be implemented in Java, should form a separate OSGi bundle that conforms to the OpenADR standard for energy management and demand response. Thus, a link between the Colibri smart building energy management system and external smart grid agents is established.

Benefit for the Student

Dive into latest technologies and emerging protocols for the Internet of Things, the Semantic Web, and the smart grid. Improve your experiences in Java-based software development as well as smart grid technologies and energy management standards.

Benefit for the Project

In order to provide a comprehensive management of building energy consumption and corresponding costs using Colibri, an integration of emerging smart grid technologies and standards is inevitable and essential. By means of an OpenADR connector, demand response interaction with smart grid agents can be realized in order to coordinate local energy consumption with current price information or grid constraints.

Requirements

Strong skills in Java-based software development are necessary. Moreover, basic understanding of smart grid interaction is a prerequisite.

Mentors

Daniel Schachinger, Thomas Frühwirth, Wolfgang Kastner

More information

https://github.com/dschachinger/colibri (Colibri)
http://www.openadr.org/ (OpenADR)