Infrastructure for collaborating data-researchers in a smart grid pilot

A large amount of stakeholders are often involved in Smart Grid projects. Each partner has its own way of storing, representing and accessing its data. An integrated data storage and a joint online analytical mining infrastructure is needed to limit the amount of duplicated work and to raise the overall security of the system. The proposed infrastructure is composed of standard application software and an in-house developed data analysis tool that allows researchers to add and share their own functionality without compromising security

Ready To Roll: Southeastern Pennsylvania's Regional Electric Vehicle Action Plan

On-road internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles are responsible for nearly one-third of energy use and one-quarter of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in southeastern Pennsylvania.1 Electric vehicles (EVs), including plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) and all-electric vehicles (AEVs), present an opportunity to serve a significant portion of the region's mobility needs while simultaneously reducing energy use, petroleum dependence, fueling costs, and GHG emissions. As a national leader in EV readiness, the region can serve as an example for other efforts around the country."Ready to Roll! Southeastern Pennsylvania's Regional EV Action Plan (Ready to Roll!)" is a comprehensive, regionally coordinated approach to introducing EVs and electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) into the five counties of southeastern Pennsylvania (Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Philadelphia). This plan is the product of a partnership between the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC), the City of Philadelphia, PECO Energy Company (PECO; the region's electricity provider), and Greater Philadelphia Clean Cities (GPCC). Additionally, ICF International provided assistance to DVRPC with the preparation of this plan. The plan incorporates feedback from key regional stakeholders, national best practices, and research to assess the southeastern Pennsylvania EV market, identify current market barriers, and develop strategies to facilitate vehicle and infrastructure deployment

Co-innovation: the future of telemedicine in developing countries

Telemedicine which has been widely adopted in developed countries to reach all its citizens irrespective of their location is only being used for education purposes or disaster relief in developing countries. Since developing countries already suffer inadequate healthcare provision especially in remote areas, it would be essential to implement telemedicine practices for daily clinical uses rather than education use. This research argues that to understand the future of telemedicine in developing countries, both well-established technology innovations adoption factors as well as co-innovation factors should be addressed. In the context of healthcare provision, we propose a conceptual framework that integrates the healthcare resources and the organisational affiliations in co-innovation

Design of a management infrastructure for smart grid pilot data processing and analysis

Future smart grids will combine power grid technologies with information and communication technologies to enable a more efficient, reliable and sustainable energy production and distribution. To realize such a smart grid, large scale pilot projects are currently implemented and evaluated. Such pilot projects generate an excessive amount of data that needs to be processed: energy measurements, information on available flexibility from smart devices that can be shifted in time, control signals, dynamic prices, environmental data, etc. To validate and analyze the gathered data and adjust the running experiments in real-time, an optimized data management infrastructure is needed as well as comprehensive visualization tools. In this paper we present a data management infrastructure optimized for the follow up of the large scale smart grid project called Linear. In this project a pilot in over 200 households is implemented to evaluate several business cases including the balancing of renewable energy supply and the mitigation of voltage and power issues in distribution grids. By decoupling the gathering of the incoming data, the processing and storage of the data, and the data visualization and analysis on different servers, each with their own, optimized database, we obtain an efficient system for validation of the generated data in the pilot, management of the deployed set-ups and follow-up of the ongoing experiments in real-time

E-Health Technologies in Attainment of the Millennium Development Goals for Africa Healthcare System

The challenge of quality and equitable health services provisioning in Africa is daunting. Advances in e-health technologies hold great potential to revolutionalize health systems in Africa. This paper examines the African health systems challenges and the potential in e-health technologies in enabling the attainment of the African health Millennium Development Goals. An e-health research, innovation and partnership strategy is proposed towards this end. Some implications are posited and conclusion drawn

TOWARDS INSTITUTIONAL INFRASTRUCTURES FOR E-SCIENCE: The Scope of the Challenge

The three-fold purpose of this Report to the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Research Councils (UK) is to: • articulate the nature and significance of the non-technological issues that will bear on the practical effectiveness of the hardware and software infrastructures that are being created to enable collaborations in e- Science; • characterise succinctly the fundamental sources of the organisational and institutional challenges that need to be addressed in regard to defining terms, rights and responsibilities of the collaborating parties, and to illustrate these by reference to the limited experience gained to date in regard to intellectual property, liability, privacy, and security and competition policy issues affecting scientific research organisations; and • propose approaches for arriving at institutional mechanisms whose establishment would generate workable, specific arrangements facilitating collaboration in e-Science; and, that also might serve to meet similar needs in other spheres such as e- Learning, e-Government, e-Commerce, e-Healthcare. In carrying out these tasks, the report examines developments in enhanced computer-mediated telecommunication networks and digital information technologies, and recent advances in technologies of collaboration. It considers the economic and legal aspects of scientific collaboration, with attention to interactions between formal contracting and 'private ordering' arrangements that rest upon research community norms. It offers definitions of e-Science, virtual laboratories, collaboratories, and develops a taxonomy of collaborative e-Science activities which is implemented to classify British e-Science pilot projects and contrast these with US collaboratory projects funded during the 1990s. The approach to facilitating inter-organizational participation in collaborative projects rests upon the development of a modular structure of contractual clauses that permit flexibility and experience-based learning.

Integrating Plug-in Electric Vehicles into the Grid: Policy Entrepreneurship in California

The deployment of large numbers of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs), in order to satisfy zero-emission-vehicle (ZEV) goals in California, brings both potential benefits and costs for the electric grid. Since early 2009, the issue of so-called vehicle-grid integration (VGI) has become a center-stage policy discussion among the electricity and transportation sectors. By conducting a policy process analysis, this research addresses the questions of how the policy process for VGI regulations has been formed in California, and what have been the major challenges in policy-making. A series of interviews were conducted between with representatives of 18 organizations from the government, electric utility, and PEV sectors. The qualitative data is analyzed under the three dimensions of policy process; problem, politics, and policy as suggested by Multiple Streams framework (Kingdon, 1995). The results show that a policy window for VGI regulations was opened for the first time by the political stream, through State Senate Bill 626 in 2009, and later, supported by the Governor’s ZEV action plan in 2012. In response, the California Public Utility Commission became a policy entrepreneur, and has adopted an incremental policy-making strategy targeting investor-owned utilities (IOUs). The two largest barriers facing an effective policy solution are identified as the complexities involved in quantifying economic value from VGI and the feasibility concerns about adopting VGI enabling technologies on the grid