The research project we aim to deepen is to investigate on the development of new approaches, based on recent ICT proposals, for the enhancement of Smart Grids management. This research goal is from a long time active in University of Salerno, here we detail some specific items currently in progress among the research team of LASA (Laboratory of Agent-based Systems), Dept. of Computer Science at University of Salerno.

The basic consideration comes from our observation that classical ICT platforms are not capable to support with full capacity the new challenges offered by recent enhancement of Smart Grids, especially if we consider the remarkable improvements in terms of Energy Efficiency, Provisioning, Forecasting, Demand Response facilities.

Our research initiative consider as a strategic point the synergistic combination of the following technological stream

1)      Semantic Web

2)      Computational Intelligence

3)      Multi-Agent Systems

We have started to combine these approaches to face with some complex problems around Smart Grids.  As main research objective,  we are investigating on the role of Web Semantic technologies (in particular the role of Ontologies) as more powerful approach to describe the contextual domain of electric grids, not only considering the electrical elements, but extending this approach also to describe “actors” that interact with the smart grids, for example maintenance teams. The ontological representation enables to improve some complex task of decision support systems, we are focusing in fieldforce management, by linking ontology-based information/services with advanced (multi)optimization criteria.

We aim to relate this research project with CIM standard, in order to try to develop some open-source deliverable that we hope can be useful for the CIM community.