An Electricity Price-Aware Open-Source Smart Socket for the Internet of Energy

[Abstracts] The Internet of Energy (IoE) represents a novel paradigm where electrical power systems work cooperatively with smart devices to increase the visibility of energy consumption and create safer, cleaner and sustainable energy systems. The implementation of IoE services involves the use of multiple components, like embedded systems, power electronics or sensors, which are an essential part of the infrastructure dedicated to the generation and distribution energy and the one required by the final consumer. This article focuses on the latter and presents a smart socket system that collects the information about energy price and makes use of sensors and actuators to optimize home energy consumption according to the user preferences. Specifically, this article provides three main novel contributions. First, what to our knowledge is the first hardware prototype that manages in a practical real-world scenario the price values obtained from a public electricity operator is presented. The second contribution is related to the definition of a novel wireless sensor network communications protocol based on Wi-Fi that allows for creating an easy-to-deploy smart plug system that self-organizes and auto-configures to collect the sensed data, minimizing user intervention. Third, it is provided a thorough description of the design of one of the few open-source smart plug systems, including its communications architecture, the protocols implemented, the main sensing and actuation components and the most relevant pieces of the software. Moreover, with the aim of illustrating the capabilities of the smart plug system, the results of different experiments performed are shown. Such experiments evaluate in real-world scenarios the system’s ease of use, its communications range and its performance when using HTTPS. Finally, the economic savings are estimated for different appliances, concluding that, in the practical situation proposed, the smart plug system allows certain energy-demanding appliances to save almost €70 per yearGalicia. Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria; ED431C 2016-045Galicia. Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria; ED341D R2016/012Galicia. Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria; ED431G/01Agencia Estatal de Investigación; TEC2013-47141-C4-1-RAgencia Estatal de Investigación; TEC2015-69648-REDCAgencia Estatal de Investigación; TEC2016-75067-C4-1-

Privacy In The Smart Grid: An Information Flow Analysis

Project Final Report prepared for CIEE and California Energy Commissio

On M2M Micropayments : A Case Study of Electric Autonomous Vehicles

The proliferation of electric vehicles has spurred the research interest in technologies associated with it, for instance, batteries, and charging mechanisms. Moreover, the recent advancements in autonomous cars also encourage the enabling technologies to integrate and provide holistic applications. To this end, one key requirement for electric vehicles is to have an efficient, secure, and scalable infrastructure and framework for charging, billing, and auditing. However, the current manual charging systems for EVs may not be applicable to the autonomous cars that demand new, automatic, secure, efficient, and scalable billing and auditing mechanism. Owing to the distributed systems such as blockchain technology, in this paper, we propose a new charging and billing mechanism for electric vehicles that charge their batteries in a charging-on-the-move fashion. To meet the requirements of billing in electric vehicles, we leverage distributed ledger technology (DLT), a distributed peer-to-peer technology for micro-transactions. Our proof-of-concept implementation of the billing framework demonstrates the feasibility of such system in electric vehicles. It is also worth noting that the solution can easily be extended to the electric autonomous cars (EACs)

International Conference on Computer Science and Communication Engineering

UBT Annual International Conference is the 9th international interdisciplinary peer reviewed conference which publishes works of the scientists as well as practitioners in the area where UBT is active in Education, Research and Development. The UBT aims to implement an integrated strategy to establish itself as an internationally competitive, research-intensive university, committed to the transfer of knowledge and the provision of a world-class education to the most talented students from all background. The main perspective of the conference is to connect the scientists and practitioners from different disciplines in the same place and make them be aware of the recent advancements in different research fields, and provide them with a unique forum to share their experiences. It is also the place to support the new academic staff for doing research and publish their work in international standard level. This conference consists of sub conferences in different fields like: Art and Digital Media Agriculture, Food Science and Technology Architecture and Spatial Planning Civil Engineering, Infrastructure and Environment Computer Science and Communication Engineering Dental Sciences Education and Development Energy Efficiency Engineering Integrated Design Information Systems and Security Journalism, Media and Communication Law Language and Culture Management, Business and Economics Modern Music, Digital Production and Management Medicine and Nursing Mechatronics, System Engineering and Robotics Pharmaceutical and Natural Sciences Political Science Psychology Sport, Health and Society Security Studies This conference is the major scientific event of the UBT. It is organizing annually and always in cooperation with the partner universities from the region and Europe. We have to thank all Authors, partners, sponsors and also the conference organizing team making this event a real international scientific event

Internet of Things-aided Smart Grid: Technologies, Architectures, Applications, Prototypes, and Future Research Directions

Traditional power grids are being transformed into Smart Grids (SGs) to address the issues in existing power system due to uni-directional information flow, energy wastage, growing energy demand, reliability and security. SGs offer bi-directional energy flow between service providers and consumers, involving power generation, transmission, distribution and utilization systems. SGs employ various devices for the monitoring, analysis and control of the grid, deployed at power plants, distribution centers and in consumers' premises in a very large number. Hence, an SG requires connectivity, automation and the tracking of such devices. This is achieved with the help of Internet of Things (IoT). IoT helps SG systems to support various network functions throughout the generation, transmission, distribution and consumption of energy by incorporating IoT devices (such as sensors, actuators and smart meters), as well as by providing the connectivity, automation and tracking for such devices. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on IoT-aided SG systems, which includes the existing architectures, applications and prototypes of IoT-aided SG systems. This survey also highlights the open issues, challenges and future research directions for IoT-aided SG systems

Electricity Theft in Nigeria: How Effective Are the Existing Laws?

There is an overwhelming concern that if electricity theft is not controlled urgently, it will contribute immensely to a continued cycle of mountain debts and inefficiencies for not just the DISCOs but also for the GENCOs. There is an estimated average loss of about N21 billion annually in the power sector to energy theft. Against this backdrop, this paper provides a menu of options for the DISCOs in controlling electricity theft. In doing this, existing laws and regulations prohibiting energy theft in Nigeria and relevant empirical literatures were duly reviewed. Cutting edge ideas on how to combat electricity theft were drawn from cross country experiences. Experience from the United Kingdom, United States of America and South Africa coupled with Nigeria’s peculiarities informed the issues raised for legislative consideration. Keywords: Electricity theft; existing laws; Nigeria. JEL Classification: D11, D

Development of a Smart, Low-cost and IoT-enabled System for Energy Management

With the advent of the Internet comes not only the opportunity to send and receive data from our peers or fellow humans, but also the opportunity to send and receive data from our devices. This concept is known as the concept of Internet of things (IoT), and it proposes immense opportunities, part of which can be applied to solving the growing issue of power/energy management. The consumption of electricity has skyrocketed in recent years, and methods which are costly and of harm to the environment are also mostly used in electricity generation. Therefore, energy monitoring, management and efficiency is of utmost importance to improve the power sector of any economy. A solution to the growing issue of energy monitoring and management is a cheap and smart electricity socket that could show the users the amount of energy they spend at every point in time for each of their devices (in monetary terms). The socket allows users to set limits to their power usage by switching their devices on and off remotely. A database of home appliances is also set up to enable awareness on the various energy profiles for different devices and appliances and proffer energy efficient alternatives to such devices based on usage and region, using intelligent web systems. The Smart Socket makes use of the IoT concept of Smart Metering to measure key energy consumption data and will send instantaneous data to a web server to be saved to a database and accessed by permitted users. This project primarily addresses the need for access to data and proper information in making informed decisions concerning energy management and usage

Last-Meter Smart Grid Embedded in an Internet-of-Things Platform

The customer domain of the smart grid natu- rally blends with smart home and smart building systems, but typical proposed approaches are “distributor-centric” rather than “customer-centric,” undermining user acceptance, and are often poorly scalable. To solve this problem, we propose a detailed architecture and an implementation of a “last-meter” smart grid—the portion of the smart grid on customer premises—embedded in an internet-of-things (IoT) platform. Our approach has four aspects of novelty and advantages with respect to the state of the art: 1) seamless integration of smart grid with smart home applications in the same infrastructure; 2) data gathering from heterogeneous sensor communication protocols; 3) secure and customized data access; and 4) univocal sensor and actuator mapping to a common abstraction layer on which additional concurrent applications can be built. A demonstrator has been built and tested with purposely-developed ZigBee smart meters and gateways, a distributed IoT server, and a flexible user interface

Porting and tuning of the Mont-Blanc benchmarks to the multicore ARM 64bit architecture

This project is about porting and tuning the Mont-Blanc benchmarks to the multicore ARM 64 bits architecture. The Mont-Blanc benchmarks are part of the Mont-Blanc European project and they have been developed internally in the BSC (Barcelona Supercomputing Center). The project will explore the possibilities that an ARM architecture can offer running in a HPC (High Performance Computing) setup, this includes to learn how to tune and adapt a parallelized computer program and analyze its execution behavior. As part of the project, we will analyze the performance of each benchmark using instrumentation tools such like Extrae and Paraver. Each benchmark will be adapted, tuned and executed mainly in the three new Mont-Blanc mini-clusters, Thunder (ARMv8 custom), Merlin (ARMv8 custom) and Jetson TX (ARMv8 cortex-a57) using the OmpSs programming model. The evolution of the performance obtained will be shown followed by a brief analysis of the results after each optimization.Aquest projecte es basa en adaptar i afinar els Mont-Blanc benchmarks a l’arquitectura multinucli ARM 64 bits. Els Mont-Blanc benchmarks formen part del projecte Europeu Mont-Blanc i han estat desenvolupats internament en el BSC (Barcelona Supercomputing Center). Aquest projecte explorarà el potencial d’usar l’arquitectura ARM en un entorn HPC (High Performance Computing), això inclou aprendre a adaptar i afinar un programa paral·lel, i analitzar el seu comportament durant l’execució. Com a part del projecte, s’analitzarà el rendiment de cada benchmark usant eines d’instrumentació com Extrae o Paraver. Cada benchmark serà adaptat, afinat i executat en els tres nous miniclústers de Mont-Blanc, Thunder (ARMv8 personalitzat), Merlin (ARMv8 personalitzat) i Jetson TX (ARMv8 cortex-a57) usant el model de programació OmpSs. Es mostrarà l’evolució del rendiment, seguit d’una breu explicació dels resultats després de cada optimització.Este proyecto se basa en adaptar y afinar los Mont-blanc benchmarks a la arquitectura multi-núcleo ARM 64 bits. Los Mont-Blanc benchmarks forman parte del proyecto Europeo Mont-Blanc y han sido desarrollados internamente en el BSC (Barcelona Supercomputing Center). Este proyecto explorará el potencial de usar la arquitectura ARM en un entorno HPC (High Performance Computing), esto incluye aprender a adaptar y afinar un programa paralelo, y analizar su comportamiento durante la ejecución. Como parte del proyecto, se analizará el rendimiento de cada benchmark usando herramientas de instrumentación como Extrae o Paraver. Cada benchmark será adaptado, afinado y ejecutado en los tres nuevos mini-clústeres de Mont-Blanc, Thunder (ARMv8 personalizado), Merlin (ARMv8 personalizado) y Jetson TX (ARMv8 cortex-a57) usando el modelo de programación OmpSs. Se mostrará la evolución del rendimiento obtenido, y una breve explicación de los resultados después de cada optimización