Nico Baken

First experiences with Personal Networks as an enabling platform for service providers

By developing demonstrators and performing small-scale user trials, we found various opportunities and pitfalls for deploying personal networks (PNs) on a commercial basis. The demonstrators were created using as many as possible legacy devices and proven technologies. They deal with applications in the health sector, home services, tourism, and the transportation sector. This paper describes the various architectures and our experiences with the end users and the technology. We conclude that context awareness, service discovery, and content management are very important in PNs and that a personal network provider role is necessary to realize these functions under the assumptions we made. The PNPay Travel demonstrator suggests that PN service platforms provide an opportunity to develop true trans-sector services.

The smart home landscape: a qualitative meta-analysis

Technological innovations, varying from ubiquitous computing, intelligent appliances, telecommunication, robotics, to wearable sensors, enable new Smart Home (SH) applications. More and more academic publications reporting on experiments on SH can be found. A comprehensive clustering of concepts and approaches is largely missing. Based on an extensive review of SH literature, this paper proposes a framework that decomposes the SH research into four domains and 15 sub-domains. The framework is applied to visualize the state of the art of SH research, and to outline future challenges. The framework helps researchers to identify gaps in SH research.

Architecting the smart grid as a holarchy

The ever increasing concerns for energy security, energy efficiency, and sustainable energy is offering various challenges for the power grid. With increasing penetration of the distributed generations, the electricity power system is facing an era of prosumerization, whereby all stakeholders can autonomously produce, consume, import and/or export power. The classical power grid with top-down organization and control does not fit this dynamics, hence reorganizing the rather old architecture of the system is indispensable. In this paper, we propose a generic architecture of the smart grid that fits the new scenario based on the concepts of holons. The proposed architecture of the system is composed of autonomous prosumers that are organized bottom-up in a recursive manner involving various aggregation layers, forming a dynamically reconfigurable system. A corresponding control architecture that employs a holonic approach to simultaneously capture the autonomy of the prosumers, the recursion and the dynamic reconfiguration of the proposed system is also proposed. We extend our work by proposing a service oriented architecture (SOA) framework to support our control architecture.

Designing reliable and resilient smart low-voltage grids

The electric power grid is a critical infrastructure that delivers electricity from power generation sources to consumers. At this time, renewable and distributed sources of electricity as well as new technologies that introduce large loads are significantly changing load profiles in low-voltage grids. This trend calls for reassessing the structure of low-voltage grids to examine if they can safely accommodate the new load profiles. The future smart grid will also rely on information and communications networks to support decentralized power distribution. The information and communications network nodes may depend on the grid for power supply, leading to bidirectional interdependence between the two types of networks that could affect the reliability of the power grid.This paper focuses on the problem of enhancing the reliability of future low-voltage grids by improving their structure and dealing with their interdependence with information and communications networks. The paper investigates the structural features of a low-voltage grid and assesses their influence on the ability of the grid to handle new load profiles. Concepts from complex networks theory are used to derive relevant structural metrics that characterize the structural properties of low-voltage grids and performance metrics are proposed to assess their operational performance. Several low-voltage networks are analyzed under various loading scenarios to observe the influence of structural metrics of a low-voltage grid on its operational metrics. Based on this analysis, a constraint programming formulation is proposed for the cost-optimal and robust structural design of a low-voltage grid. In addition, a design algorithm is proposed that considers the interdependence of information and communications network nodes on power grid nodes to increase the reliability of the grid.

Last-mile communication time requirements of the smart grid

With the growing need for sustainable energy, different renewable energy sources as well as low carbon technologies, such as electric vehicles, are increasingly penetrating into the electric power system. The increased deployment of distributed energy sources leads to a decentralized power distribution. The smart grid relies on communication networks to support efficient and decentralized power distribution. To deploy appropriate communication infrastructure for the smart grid, its communication time requirements need to be clearly identified. In this paper, we investigate the last-mile communication time requirements of the smart grid. By closely observing the worst-case node voltage and cable load dynamics in a low-voltage (LV) power grid supporting a neighborhood that is composed of prosumer households, we are able to analyze the worst-case communication time requirements in controlling the LV grid.

Multi-Weighted Monetary Transaction Network

This paper aims to both develop and apply advances from the field of complex networks to large economic systems and explore the (dis)similarities between economic systems and other real-world complex networks. For the first time, the nature and evolution of the Dutch economy are captured by means of a data set analysis that describes the monetary transactions among 105 economical activity clusters over the period 1987–2007. We propose to represent this data set as a multi-weighted network, called the monetary transaction network. Each node represents a unique activity cluster. Nodes are interconnected via monetary transactions. The millions of euros that traverse the links and that circulate inside each activity cluster are denoted by a link weight and a node weight respectively. By applying innovative methodologies from network theory, we observe important features of the monetary transaction network as well as its evolution: (a) Activity clusters with a large internal flow tend to cooperate with many other clusters via high volume monetary transactions. (b) Activity clusters with a lower internal transaction volume prefer to transact with fewer neighboring nodes that have a higher internal flow. (c) The node weights seem to follow a power law distribution. Surprisingly, (b) and (c) have been observed in community structures of many real-world networks as well. (d) Activity clusters tend to balance the monetary volume of their transactions with their neighbors, reflected by a positive link weight correlation around each node. This correlation becomes stronger over time while the number of links increases over time as well.

Towards systematic development of trans-sector digital innovations

Digital Information Networks (DINs) connect all economic and societal sectors, bringing within reach all kinds of novel trans-sector digital innovations: innovations involving multiple sectors enabled by DINs. This paper describes a framework to conceptualize novel trans-sector digital innovations. Our motivation for this work is to systematize the development of DIN enabled innovations across different sectors. This work fits in an emerging scientific field labelled by some as services science, an interdisciplinary new area of study to address the challenge of becoming more systematic about services innovation. We demonstrate the applicability of our framework by mapping it to 20 trans-sector digital innovation ideas. Primarily, this works aims at telecommunication service providers looking for new revenue streams and IT service developers. With this work, the maverick vision of industrializing the development of trans-sector digital innovations comes within reach.

Smart integration of electric vehicles in an energy community

With increasing penetrations of renewable distributed generations (DGs) and electrified vehicles (EVs), the volatility of the renewable sources and the huge load of the EVs induce tremendous challenges for the power grid. The two technologies also have considerable synergetic potential to alleviate these challenges if they are intelligently coordinated. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the (dis)charging of EVs could be intelligently coordinated with the production of the local DGs to reduce the peak load on the power grid. We consider a neighborhood energy community that is composed of prosumer households. Three EV (dis)charging scenarios are compared: the dumb strategy where all EVs are charged for the next commute as soon as they return from the previous commute, the centralized (dis)charging strategy where the EVs are managed by a centralized scheduling unit, and the distributed (dis)charging strategy where the households autonomously schedule their EVs while coordination is achieved through providing dynamic pricing based incentives. Our simulation results show that the distributed and centralized charging strategies can reduce the peak load up to 44.9% and 75.1%, respectively, compared to the dumb charging strategy. Moreover, the relative performance of the algorithms with respect to environmental values.

Model for Trans-sector Digital Interoperability

Interoperability refers to the ability of two or more systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged. The importance of interoperability has grown together with the adoption of Digital Information Networks (DINs). DINs refer to information networks supported by telecommunication infrastructures and terminated by microprocessors. With an upcoming interest in services science and transsector business models, a stronger driver arises to further break the interoperability barriers across sectors. In this paper, we propose a novel model to address trans-sector digital interoperability, which by definition involves interoperability across different economic sectors connected by DINs. Particularly, we specify how a well known interoperability framework, the ATHENA framework, should be adapted for the economic sector plane. Based on data from the Eurostat survey on ICT usage and e-Commerce in enterprises, we illustrate how conclusions about trans-sector interoperability can be extracted and technological implications can be derived.