Posted by Tassilo Pellegrini on July 8, 2010 under conferences & events | 
If you are interested in getting to know more about Semantic Smart Metering you can meet us at the following outreach events and experience our demonstrator in action:
- I-Semantics 2010 – 6th International Conference on Semantic Systems, September 1–3, 2010, Graz, Austria
- 3rd Future Internet Symposium 2010 (FIS’10), September 20–22, 2010, Berlin, Germany
- Ubiquitous Computing for Sustainable Energy (UCSE2010) workshop at the 12th ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp’10), September 26-29, 2010, Copenhagen, Denmark
- Sesame Public Project Meeting, October 1, 2010, Vienna, Austria – Location to be announced
- 4th European Semantic Technology Conference (ESTC’10), December 2–3, 2010, Vienna, Austria
Posted by Tassilo Pellegrini on July 1, 2010 under architecture, prototype |
After 9 months of development we can finally present the Semantic Smart Meter Demonstrator.
What still looks rather wild contains lots of “smartness”.
The Smart Meter provides all basic functionalities for metering the energy consumption.
The Smart Plugs handle all data input from external devices like lamps, washing machines, stereo, etc.
The Universal Control Box reads and controls all sensors and plugs. The following sensors are currently available: light, humidity and temperature.
The Gibraltar Gateway & Concenrator contains the firewall, a JENA triple store and a Pellet rules engine.
The demonstrator can be manipulated by a touchable interface.
You can experience the demonstrator at several events coming up in the near future.
Posted by Tassilo Pellegrini on June 22, 2010 under miscellaneous |
From June 17 – 18, 2010 the consortium held its 4th project meeting at EZAN in Chernogolovka, Russia. Two days of itense prototyping kept us busy, but we finally succeded in integrating all hardware and software components of the metering system (for details conduct the following blogpost).
Enjoy some impressions of our journey!
Rainy arrival at Domodevodo airport near Moscow.
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Posted by Tassilo Pellegrini on May 5, 2010 under GUI |
SESAME Home implements several functions for Home Automation Network (HAN) monitoring and management. It is intended to be used for monitoring sensor values, environment, energy consumption and device availability. Also it is used for setting desired states for controlled locations and creating and re-planning device plans. The following screenshots give you an impression of the Sesame interface. We deliberatelly tried to make the GUI as intuitive as possible following the look and feel of contemporary touch screen designs.
Fig. 1 shows various functionalities of the Sesame system. The buttons at the bottom enable the user to choose from various locations either inside or outside the household. In this special case the user chose the „Environmental“ button to retrieve information about the weather from YahooWeather as forecast provider. Read more of this article »
Posted by Tassilo Pellegrini on April 20, 2010 under case study, efficiency gains, user profiling |
To gain an insight into behavioral patterns four in-depth interviews were conducted with two men and two women living in individual households. The sample was not meant to be in any way representative for a certain kind of cohort, social class or target group but was intended to identify occupancy patterns, device types and their corresponding usage. Therefore, two time frames have been analyzed. The interviewees were asked to describe in detail their appliance usage during morning time from getting up to leaving for work – a time frame which is in so far crucial as morning hours generate peak loads at the energy providers’ side. Additionally, participants were asked to describe a typical week in their lives which was necessary to capture occupancy and sleeping patterns during workdays and weekends.
From this information we modeled a normalized seven day period in a single resident household representing the devices in use, occupancy and sleeping patterns. The average energy consumption per device-type was calculated and differentiated by active and passive use. By applying tariff schemes from the Austrian Energy Exchange we also calculated the average energy costs for a single household per day and per week. These calculations were crucial as simple scenarios showed that a change in behavior might lead to a reduction of energy consumption but not necessarily to a cost reduction and vice versa if the prices of the energy market would be used by the end customer. These effects have to be observed closely as cost-efficiency and energy-efficiency do not necessarily correlate positively.
The empirical modeling of usage patterns performed within this diary experiment lead to the conclusion that policy based energy control could affect energy savings of up to 24% by simply applying automated turn-off rules to stand-by devices and ad-hoc devices alone when streamlined with the behavioral patterns of the user.
We will continue with this empirical work and search for more granular and non-bivious saving potentails in the following months.
Posted by Tassilo Pellegrini on March 5, 2010 under prototype |
From March 4 – 5, 2010 the consortium met for the third time at the Marriott Hotel in Linz / Austria.
On the first day we started off with a brief update about the efforts since the last meeting. Slobodanka and Vikash from FTW gave an update on the policy modelling module which will be based on OWL using a Pellet reasoner to execute the inferences. The two Vladimirs from E-Smart presented the database model for the collected sensor data and the new GUI of the Zigbee configuration tool. Mirna from E-Smart gave an impressive talk on tarif modells in the electricity market and a rough ontological model to couple electricity consumption to procinbg information. The major part of the day was dedicated to hands on sessions in advancing the smart metering infrastructure. eSYS, E-Smart and EZAN finally managed to get the virtual machine running on the UCB and are now working on the direct execution of semantic codes within the JVM running on the Gibraltar hardware appliances.
The second day started off with invited presentations from Andreas Langegger from the University of Vienna and Erwin Mayer and Günter Rosenauer from Energie AG. Andreas gave a lightining talk on the current state of the Semantic Web and its potential benefits for managing energy data. Günter Rosenauer from Energie AG presented first results from their running project AMIS, a testbed of 15.000 smart meters being operated in Upper Austria. Erwin Mayer gave a talk about the electricity trading market and the variance in electricity value during a day. The afternoon session was dedicated to lots of hands on practice advancing on integration issues for the demonstrator that will be available be June.
Posted by Tassilo Pellegrini on January 28, 2010 under miscellaneous, regulation |
During our f2f-meeting in Belgrade from December 17 – 18, 2010 the Serbian TV station eTV produced a feature about the project and its impact on the Serbian energy market. Enjoy (in Serbian language)!
Posted by Tassilo Pellegrini on January 14, 2010 under architecture, prototype |
Here is a rough outline of the SeSaMe architecture.
We believe that UCB should be represented as an unique device. We are proposing this, based on State-Of-The-Art from the area of smart metering and home automation, as well as scenarios and business cases presented in this area. UCB architecture should be divided into three layers: Security and Internet communication, Services and Applications and HAN communication. According to our perspective, architecture of UCB should look like the draft on the Figure below.
Particular functions of this complex architecture, in the context of the SESAME project, could be implemented on different physical devices. However, all this devices should communicate and operate as unique workstation.
Major changes to the previous architecture proposals regard to the way of real-time measurement of electricity consumption. We examined, very carefully, the problem of intensive reading of electricity consumption data from electric smart meter and we came to the conclusion that it is much more economical and efficient to acquire the information from electricity smart plugs. Beside that, with electricity smart plugs make it possible obtain information of consumption for every particular device. However, periodically collected data from smart plagues should be compared and scaled with data read from smart meter. This way, we will obtain consumption data most efficiently, and also provide mechanisms for their validation, with respect to the smart meter’s more sophisticated method and results of measurement. Data from the smart meter would be gathered indirectly from the smart-concentrator. On the other hand smart-concentrators could be used in more sophisticated scenarios for peak load management.
Security and Internet communication layer could be implemented on the Gibraltar device as illustrated in the next picture.
Service and Application layer could be implemented on any kind of embedded PC device including Gibraltar, Telecont or E-Smart service box. We would also advice to reconsider adding a smart display – touch screen, in the prototype architecture. Using smart display users could access UCB applications in more intuitive way.
Finally, HAN Communication layer could be developed on the EZAN Telecont platform. At the same time we are thinking of implementing Zigbee technology on the Han communication layer, as a channel of communication with electricity smart plugs.
Considering the proposed group of sensors and actuators, we think that we should retain a set of sensors, actuators and controllers established during the kick-off meeting. That means that it should minimally consist of: light, CO₂, heat and humidity, motion sensors, controllers of HVAC, lighting and switches for big home appliances e.g. wash machine, or temperature controller of refrigerator etc.
Posted by Anna Fensel on December 30, 2009 under prototype |
Michael Schwanzer, our Master thesis student at FTW and Technikum Wien, has been developing a GreenHomeChallenge game on Facebook:
http://apps.facebook.com/greenhomechallenge/
It is an interactive real-time game which you can play with friends and other people competing on whose virtual home is more energy efficient (in particular, creating, sharing and applying smart policies)!
You are kindly invited to play yourself, send feedback, and spread a word about the game to your “friends”.
Posted by Tassilo Pellegrini on December 28, 2009 under miscellaneous |
From December 17 – 18, 2009 we held our second project meeting in Belgrade. Frosty weather made our trip quite adventerous but did not hinder us to make some big conceptual leaps in our project goals (For details please refer to the post on the SeSaMe architecture.)
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