Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM

Fraunhofer Gesellschaft is Europe’s largest organisation for applied research and development. The Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM focuses on creating products, technologies, and business models from mathematical techniques, e.g., modelling, simulation, optimisation, and algorithm design. The institute’s Competence Centre High Performance Computing CC HPC focuses on optimisation of distributed resources. Green-By-IT is a research group within CC HPC focussed on the optimisation of distributed energy resources with IT. It has expertise in aggregation, holistic simulation, load and generation forecasting techniques (based on machine learning), and control and optimisation of distributed energy resources from all sectors: electricity, heat, cooling, and electric mobility. Green-By-IT also has expertise in energy industry business models and the surrounding regulatory frameworks.

Fraunhofer ITWM has developed the Amperix® cross-sector energy management system. Amperix is a low-cost device installed locally and connected to all present monitoring and control assets. Amperix supports a wide variety of connections, protocols, and devices in a manufacturer-independent and cross-sectoral manner. Amperix is capable of providing energy and optimisation services within its local domain (typically one household or one building) and controls devices in near real time (< 1 s).

The myPowerGrid platform technology, also developed by Fraunhofer ITWM, then aggregates multiple Amperix devices for holistic optimisation. Thus, entire communities, or even regions optimise themselves by using a combination of standard and tailor-made algorithms operating on the aggregated data, resulting in real-time (~1 s) amendments to local control where necessary. The technology is fit to scale an arbitrary number of devices.