The Consortium
Partner & Stakeholder
RWTH Aachen IAEW
The Institute of High Voltage Equipment and Grids, Digitalisation and Power Economics (IAEW) comprises a team of more than 120 employees including more than 90 research associates at the professorial chairs for High Voltage Equipment and Technology, Transmission Grids and Power Economics and Active Energy Distribution Grids. Main focuses of research and education are the modelling and integration of renewable energies into the European transmission and distribution grids, European energy markets and energy sector coupling. In addition, the modelling of diverse components in grid operation and grid expansion in the transmission and distribution grid as well as the assessment of protection and system stability is investigated. The institute is partner and advisor of political decision makers, federal ministries, different transmission and distribution system operators as well as of leading industrial and energy companies.
RWTH Aachen - EU Project Management Team
RWTH’s EU Project Management Team, established at the Department 4.0 – Management of Third party Management, part of RWTH’s administration, provides consultancy services for researchers. We have extensive experience in contractual, financial and administrative procedures in EU-funded projects. The EU project managers assist the RWTH institutes in project administration and monitoring, finances and reporting through the entire lifecycle of (mainly large scale) projects.
Department of Electrical, Electronic and Information Engineering "Guglielmo Marconi" (DEI)
The research unit involved in the project is composed by members of the Operations Research (OR) group of the Department of Electrical, Electronic and Information Engineering (DEI). DEI counts 116 professors and permanent researchers, more than 150 research collaborators and PhDs, and 37 non-academic staff.
There are nine main areas of research that are currently covered at DEI: automation, bioengineering, electric drives and systems, electrical and electronical measures, electrical engineering, electromagnetic fields, electronics, operations research, and telecommunications.
The OR group has an internationally-recognized visibility in the modelling of optimization problems arising in real-world applications, as well as in the design and implementation of both exact and heuristic algorithms for Mixed Integer Linear Programming problems, as it is witnessed by the list of publications of the members of the group.
OPTIT
OPTIT is a private company founded in 2007 as a spin-off of the Operations Research (OR) team of the University of Bologna, to develop innovative Decision Support Systems leveraging on forecasting, data analytics, simulation and optimization tools.
OPTIT’s team, counting more than 30 employees, integrates skilled mathematical modelling specialists, data scientists, a consolidated Software development team and numerous experienced business & management consultants as well as energy engineers. This ensures rapid development and effective delivery of innovative solutions and service to enable effective management of complexity, achieving significant cost reduction, margin enhancements and business process improvement within a user friendly framework.
OPTIT’s expertise in the Energy sector has been driven by long-lasting collaborations with some of the leading Italian Utility companies, with particular focus on District Heating & Cooling assets development and operations management, where OPTIT has developed and keeps improving some innovative solutions applied to real business models. OPTIT is active member of the Italian Association of District Heating companies (AIRU), as well as its Irish counterpart (IrDEA). OPTIT is currently part of a consortium and WP leader of the H2020 Upgrade DH project funded within EE-06 calls, focused on the improvement of existing district heating networks, called Upgrade DH. On the top of that, OPTIT keeps also tight links with various Universities to keep a close contact with knowledge frontier in the Energy field, including collaboration with the Department of Energy, Systems, Territory and Construction Engineering (DESTeC), Pisa University, Italy contributing to this project as a third party.
University of Pisa
Participating as Third Party
OPTIT calls upon University of Pisa as a third party for specific knowledge to the PlaMES project. The University of Pisa is one of the most renowned educational institutions in Italy founded in 1343. Nowadays the University of Pisa represents a prestigious modern centre for teaching and advanced research, always ranked among the top Italian universities with overall about 50 thousands students enrolled (B.Sc. plus M.Sc.) and with more than 200 PhD students graduated in 2017.
Fraunhofer Gesellschaft
The Fraunhofer Gesellschaft is Europe’s leading research organization for applied research and the Information and Communication Technology Group, is Europe‘s largest combined research unit for information technology. The Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT helps to shape the future with novel, market-oriented products. Our specific strength is a comprehensive system design process, from test and validation of concepts to the handover of well-implemented systems. We apply it to create complex systems that combine our technological innovations with significant benefits in their practical use, and to derive product frameworks from these systems. FIT has a staff of about 110 researchers from Computer Science, the Social Sciences, Psychology, Business Administration, Economics, Law and Engineering. They are organized in four research departments that focus on Cooperation Systems, Life Science Informatics, Risk Management and Decision Support, and User-Centered Computing. Fraunhofer FIT closely cooperates with Prof. Jarke‘s Information Systems group at Aachen University of Technology (RWTH). Besides its headquarters at the Fraunhofer Institute Centre Birlinghoven Castle, FIT has branch offices on the RWTH campus in Aachen, at the universities of Augsburg and Bayreuth, and recently opened an application centre in Hamm.
The department Digital Energy works on the development of high-precision digital twins of the electricity supply system and tools for its planning, operation, automation as well as monitoring. In this context, the development of innovative supply concepts for energy systems that are highly influenced by renewable energies require cross-sectoral model approaches and methods in particular. The analysis of the applicability and further development of information technologies (e.g. blockchain, high-performance computing, etc.) for use in energy supply represents another area of application of the department.
OEDAS
Osmangazi Electric Distribution Co. (OEDAS) is one of the biggest Distribution Company with 1.7 million customer and 6.1 TwH distributed energy in Turkey. OEDAS is responsible of 5 cities (Eskişehir, Afyon Karahisar, Bilecik, Kütahya, Uşak) in Turkey, located in Eskisehir with variety of network structures, customer types, and customer energy consumption profiles. Moreover, OEDAS is one of the companies under ZORLU Energy. ZORLU Energy is one of the biggest energy companies in Turkey. There are several companies which are Electric Distribution and Retail Companies, Gas Distribution and Retail Companies, Hydroelectric power plants, geothermal power plants, Wind power plants, and Natural gas power plants with various capacities under ZORLU Energy. We also invest in Electric vehicles, Electric vehicle charging infrastructures, Electric Vehicle Sharing, energy storage, smart home applications, smart cities. Our R&D team consists of 9 people, whose majority have completed graduate program, with diverse engineering (Electrical, Electronic, Mechanical and Computer Engineers), specifications and qualifications.
