Team: Rui Carlos Oliveira and Manuel Bernardo Barbosa
Abstract:Electric Energy Systems have been evolving considerably in the last years due to an increase of variable renewable power sources in the generation mix, distributed energy resources, consumer empowerment through the installation of Smart Meters, bidirectional communication with consumers, in the direction of a Smart Grid.

A two level synergistic approach is envisaged in this research line:
- Strengthening the know-how in a set of core technologies within the electric energy system area;
- Broadening the research scope to a set of enabling technologies from the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) field.
Embedding ICT with e energy system’s core technologies will leverage the development of a solid and mature Smart Grid concept with innovative solutions.
This project follows and expands the international trends in power systems related research on Smart Grids. The new vision creates many research challenges that are multidisciplinary in nature. This will involve new Smart Grid Reference Architectures, conceptualization of new SCADA/DMS and aggregation agents, active demand side management, moving from traditional load following to load-shaping, new management tools for EV and new forms of ancillary services provision, with adequate remuneration and market integration. The robust, optimal, secure, operation of such a complex and distributed system requires novel sensing, control, computational intelligence, software and communication theoretical approaches.  The multiple software layers of modern computer based systems need to be trustworthy, robust, flexible, and user friendly. Collected data needs to be reliably stored and processed to extract information using tools from data mining and signal processing.  An integrated approach of power systems and ICT to deal with all these issues will be followed here.