Project summary

An electricity grid that integrates renewable energies and enables flexible consumer and production technologies requires a reliable, efficient and socially acceptable energy infrastructure, in which households, commercial buildings and industrial buildings are connected. MatchIT proposes an interdisciplinary framework that integrates research on physical (e.g., generators), social (e.g., acceptability) and technological (e.g., ICT) aspects of the grid, which could improve current electricity infrastructures reliability, efficiency and acceptability.

We integrate cross-sectorial expertise on power distribution, control systems, building automation, computer science, and social and behavioral science to propose an interdisciplinary framework that uses innovative distributed control algorithms and an ICT platform coupled with intelligent automated techniques to improve demand-supply matching in a financially and psychologically way that is attractive and acceptable to end-users. Notably, we study interactions and interdependencies between key physical, psychological and technological layers. This significantly moves forward the state-of-the art where these issues are typically studied in isolation, with the risk of flawed or even inaccurate views.