University of Lugano, Advanced Learning and Research Institute

Who we are

USI-ALaRI (Advanced Learning and Research Institute, www.alari.ch), an Institute of Università della Svizzera italiana (Lugano, Switzerland), was established in 1999 with the mission of pro-moting research and education in Embedded Systems Design. USI-ALARI was created as a joint initiative of a number of Universities, Research Centers and Companies. The main areas of the current research activities at USI-ALARI are: system specification, co-design and optimiza-tion of pervasive systems, design of robust security solutions, power-aware modeling and design for pervasive systems.

Considering the areas relevant to AlpStore, past and on-going activities by ALaRI include re-search on smart metering (developed already since 2002, as documented by a number of publi-cations) and, more recently research related to energy efficiency. The relevant related projects include project AlpEnergy (http://www.alpenergy.net/) in the context of an InterReg Alpine Space programme and GeoGreen (https://esites.vito.be/sites/geogreen/),an ongoing project in scope of SmartGrid ERA-Net programme. In these project, ALaRI tackles the problem of system-level modeling of power systems, starting from user requirements collection and their translation into system and functional requirements for subsequent definition of information flow and design of the actual ICT-based enabling technologies (i.e. embedded systems).

What we do in the project

In scope of AlpStore project USI-ALaRI contributes to:

• Analysis of present industrial and academic state-of-the-art solutions for efficient sta-tionary and mobile storages integration in power systems.

• Definition of system context, identification of stakeholders and their requirements. De-velopment of relevant scenarios (i.e. use cases).

• Adoption of system engineering process which facilitates end-user (energy producer, consumer, authorities) requirements and constraints collection, feasibility technical and business studies etc.

• Creation of a reference model of the supporting ICT infrastructure as a result of iterative process of system engineering approach integrating research findings and pilot best-practices achievements.

• Assessments of actual pilot implementations.

The modeling process (based on UML/SysML and possibly BPMN for commercial issues) takes into account technical but also local environment characteristics aiming at determination of in-formation flow/ ICT model in form of structural and behavioral models. These models would help in achieving efficient energy utilization, production/consumption balance, monitoring, and more-over facilitate assessments.