About The University of Trento
The University of Trento (UNITN) was founded in 1962, and has been steadily ranked among the top Italian Universities by the Italian institute for statistical surveys (CENSIS) in terms of scientific productivity, research quality, educational offer and international relationships. UNITN hosts an Italian-German Centre and a joint research center with Microsoft on Bioinformatics.
The Department of Industrial Engineering (to which the researchers involved in the project belong) is composed by researchers and professors covering several complementary subjects in the field of Engineering such as Electronic Engineering, Material Engineering, Mechanics Engineering and System Engineering. Relevant to the project is also the multi-gigabit optical network prototype developed within the EU project IP-FLOW, completed a few years ago.
GreenDataNet activities
UNITN will lead two important tasks within the proposed project:
- Definition of energy models for managing smart grids which have to power residential and urban areas populated by small and medium-size data centres.
- Design, characterisation, prototyping and test of distributed monitor systems for energy consumption at microgrid level. It will also contribute to the integration of the different HW components and provide forecasting algorithms for workload management in data centres. Develop smart energy grid control tools optimised according to forecasting and state estimations.
In addition, UNITN will participate in other tasks and will take part in the dissemination of the project results.
Previous experience
The research group involved in GreenDataNet, has a well-established expertise in low-power embedded system design and testing, especially for distributed measurement and control applications. The same researchers have also recently been involved in a research project about Remote Analysis of Electrical Loads, co-funded by the local government of the Autonomous Province of Trento (Italy) aimed at developing smart energy meters in industrial environments.
The principal investigator in this project, Dr. Davide Brunelli (http://disi.unitn.it/~brunelli), has a multi-year experience in EU-FP7, Eniac and Artemis funded projects. The most recent ones are: FP7- GENESIs, Eniac-END, Artemis-CHIRON, FP7-3ENCULT, FP7-ArtistDESIGN.
UNITN is very active in providing control framework on topics related to Smart Grid, Power Measurement as well as Energy Analysis and Modelling and Load forecasting, Load Scheduling.
Several articles about phasor measurement techniques, energy management, PMU implementation and power optimization have been recently published in peer-reviewed international journals and conference proceedings.
