Institute for Technical Physics

DFG Research Training Group 2153: "Energy Status Data - Informatics Methods for its Collection, Analysis and Exploitation"

  • Contact:

    Prof. Dr. Klemens Böhm (Projekt Koordinator)

    Dr.-Ing. Giovanni De Carne (ITEP)

  • Funding:

    Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

The design of future energy systems that can also cope well with fluctuating feed-in and flexible demand is an important societal concern. One fundamental aspect is energy consumption, and this is the case for complex systems such as industrial plants or IT infrastructures. Important aspects include making it more flexible so that more sustainably and locally generated energy is used, the resilience of supply or the efficiency of new energy systems. A prerequisite for all this is the structured collection and evaluation of energy status data. These data describe energy supply, storage, transmission and use in the form of measured values, derived variables such as the degree of battery wear and influencing factors such as electricity prices.

This GRK aims at the handling of these data. An interdisciplinary approach (computer science, engineering disciplines, economics, law) is essential. It enables us to look at new scientific challenges that we can confront doctoral students with as part of their education. Thus, some of the graduate students will focus their research on the design of new methods of analysis for data streams. Based on this work, other graduates will, for example, systematically analyse characteristics and deficits of existing energy systems. We have observed, for example, that the temporal resolution of the data, but also the levels of aggregation can be very different for different planning and control tasks. This strongly varying granularity leads, among other things, to the research question of how to find anomalies in the data at the right level of abstraction. The infrastructure for energy research of the KIT Helmholtz area such as EnergyLab 2.0, whose responsible persons are involved in the graduate school, will be the subject of the study.

Another special feature of our research program, which graduates will undergo as part of their training, is the comprehensive consideration of the life cycle of energy status data, consisting of the phases of acquisition, analysis and use. This results in considerable added value compared with individual doctorates that cover the entire cycle: For example, dissertation projects corresponding to early phases of the life cycle can tailor procedures for collecting the data if the type of use is known; projects in the 'use' phase, which want to design data-based energy systems, can work with data of precisely the required quality.