Information and Communication Technology for EPN

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are pervasive in our urban neighborhoods, not just in terms of traditional computing devices but also in terms of embedded monitoring and control systems that manage our environment, in particular the energy consumption of our buildings, homes, outdoor lighting systems, traffic, and safety systems. Huge opportunity exists in leveraging these systems into neighborhood management platforms that can provide innovative energy services to the neighborhood and the wider energy grid.This chapter outlines the challenges and opportunities associated with the provision of ICT based energy positive neigbborhoods. The chapter begins with an overview of the technical challenges, changing ICT landscape and the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT). This is followed by an identification of the requirements for heterogeneous data acquisition, technologies for coping with increasingly voluminous and varied data at differing velocities and in attesting to the veracity of such data. End-to-end approaches to services at a neighborhood scale are presented followed by a discussion of a system-of-systems (SoS) approach to service provision at the district level.This system-of-systems approach, was proposed within the European Commission part funded FP7 project-COOPERaTE. In particular the concept of a Neighborhood Information Model (NIM), a metamodel approach to a common data model and an web-based service implementation is introduced as a means of integrating heterogeneous management platforms. An example of how the NIM was used within the COOPERaTE project to integrate multiple systems into an EPN platform is presented as are exemplar service. Conclusion draw the chapter to a close.