Alex Gabriel
I am a researcher from the domain of the industrial engineering. My research is aimed at assisting the design process and notably the fuzzy front-end of innovation with information systems. Without being a specialist from the domain, I already worked on projects that combined IoT and energy.
During the SMAGRINET project, I worked on identifying the missing skills in the domain of the smart grid through surveying professionals and identifying already existing trainings on smart grids. According to the skills identified from industrialists and local competitiveness clusters, a list of topics was defined and validated among the partners of the consortium. These topics were structured into 5 modules that were distributed to partners according to their expertise. Once the content is generated, a significant task was to homogenise the material and make it as visual as possible to provide the most explicit instruction to the video designer. After several iterations to adjust animation and synchronisation with the voice over, the videos, the written materials and the quizzes were integrated into the learning management system. From this stage, the remaining activity was to maintain the material.
According to the benchmark analysis of smart grid related trainings conducted at the beginning of the project, the interest and added value of this programme is its transversality. It covers various areas of expertise in order to have the largest understanding of the challenges and value of the smart grid. As it is not about deepening for hours the same topics, the content provides references and resources to let the participant explore the subject he wants to learn. The originality of this training is to provide the elements to have a global understanding while giving the keys to deepen more specific topics if necessary.
This project was an opportunity to collaborate with researchers in the field of electrical energy. It also allowed me to explore new research topics, such as the simulation of energy exchanged between prosumers using various computational techniques like multi-agent systems and computer optimization. Based on this experience, I am now leading a short course on this topic for computer engineering students. I am taking advantage of the opportunity provided by SMAGRINET and the short-term programmes to apply innovation management methodologies to the energy domain.
I think the next step for the “Smart Grid: from A to Z” programme is to provide hands-on work in addition to the knowledge quizzes. There are, indeed, nice online tools that allow testing of algorithms and learning how to use them. This would be very interesting for decision-making aspects, as well as artificial intelligence applied to energy. A further step would be the creation of educational kit for experimenting with IoT for energy.