Zied Chtourou

Performance and applicability of a new geographic routing protocol for virtual power plants

The Smart Grid (SG) incorporates communication networks to the conventional electricity system in order to intelligently integrate distributed energy resources (DERs) and allow for demand side management. The move to Smart grid in developing countries has to cope with great disparities of ICT infrastructures even within the same city. Besides, individual DERs are often too small to be allowed access to energy market, likewise power utilities are unable to effectively control and manage small DERs. We propose the use of affordable and scalable wireless communication technology to aggregate geographically sparse DERs into a single virtual power plant. The enrollment of prosumers in the VPP is conditional to financial performance of the plant. Thus, the VPPs are dynamic and are expected to scale up as more and more prosumers are attracted by their financial benefits. the communication network has to follow this progression and therefore to be scalable and rapidly deploy-able. We present a routing algorithm for data communication within the VPP to support centralized, decentralized or fully distributed control of the VPPs DERs.

Community-coupled microgrids for the implementation of a smart grid in Tunisia

Smart grids are based on the use of ICT in order to optimise the quality and the cost of electricity generation, transport and distribution. Developing countries try to upgrade their electric grids to meet the evolving needs of the end consumers and face the energy challenge. The study of smart grid instauration in such countries must consider the disparity in terms of ICT infrastructures across regions or districts. The economic issues are very significant. It is so difficult to establish an optimal global solution that satisfies all electric energy market stakeholders. In this work, we propose a strategy to initiate the institution of a smart grid in Tunisia. We describe the different current offers of the Tunisian electricity market and propose a specific approach based on the use of the concept of community-coupled microgrids managed by the electricity service provider (ESP) which further enhances the relationship with the end customer and promote the use and integration of renewables.

Enhanced packet loss recovery for real time PC-based GigE vision AVI systems

GigE vision could be a viable solution for seamless and cost effective integration of machine vision in manufacturing processes. Transmission delays, inherent to streaming and lost packets protocol implemented within the GigE, often jeopardise the implementation of networked PC-based machine vision. This is related to GigE vision open standard handling data integrity and error control through control and stream protocols GVSP and GVCP that implement data resend functions. In this work, we study the effect of data loss on the real time performance of distributed GigE vision AVI systems. We also introduce an optimised error recovery function based on definition of packets of interest POIs that allows for selective lost packet recovery based on their pertinence to subsequent machine vision processing. This scheme alleviates the traffic overhead by avoiding non-useful retransmissions. This mechanism allows reducing the latency and improving the predictability of such systems.

MgSMA: An enhanced SMA for microgrid energy management

Microgrids; the current generation of the distributed electric power systems are studied intensively in several layers as a hopeful solution for satisfy the universal energy lack. One important feature of the microgrids is the integration of reliable and secure data communication platforms to manage, supervise and control the complex areas of the power systems. These communication networks are responsible for routing power system related messages to adopt critical decisions. Several researchers have taken the challenge to lead the microgrid networks reach a level of maturity as that of traditional networks, working on architectures and protocols. We provide in this paper a specification of an applicative protocol (MgSma) based on the open SMA protocol developed by the solar technology corporation and which designated originally to interconnect Sma logger device to a DERs inverter on a master-slave architecture. The MgSma protocol is based on interrogation commands depending on the nature of the slave device; producer, consumer or hybrid unit. This enhanced protocol is designed to support not only SMA inverters but a several kind of slaves integrating principally a network interface and the Mgsma feature.