Project PICK-UP
Gruppo SIGLA is in this period committed, as project coordinator and development partner, to continue the final stages of the PICK-UP research project, funded by the Region in the context of the last round of the Regional Operational Programs (POR). The project sees the participation of 7 industrial partners and 2 research bodies, University of Genoa and CNR, who support the work thanks to their expertise. The project is aimed at creating innovative methods and tools for energy and environmental management and the reduction of consumption in heterogeneous urban districts. Fog Computing and IoT sensor networks will be integrated with new predictive control models and analysis of energy data and architectures for the aggregation and integration of distributed electricity generation sources (Microgrids), and flexible demand response (Demand Response). The project studies and develops this solution and foresees its installation in three pilot sites inside the city of Savona:
PICK-UP provides infrastructures, algorithms and dashboards for monitoring the entire platform. This is aimed at subjects interested in the management of interconnected buildings and can be used by companies, municipalities, user aggregators, etc. in order to increase energy efficiency, being able to provide ancillary services to the electricity distributor in terms of flexibility of energy demand. The district's energy management and decision support tool is developed on an Internet of Things sensor architecture, making use of the added value provided by the use of innovative technologies such as:
PICK-UP will have as its final objective the creation of a system for the supply of value-added services for all subjects interested in the management of urban districts or agglomerations of buildings, including heterogeneous ones, through:
In addition to coordinating the entire project, Gruppo SIGLA took care of the creation of the Hardware and Software infrastructure dedicated to the implementation of a collaborative fog computing architecture. Hardware nodes have been implemented that are able to position themselves between the field (sensors) and the cloud (main calculation center) to move the complexity downwards, speeding up reaction times, in particular as regards the management of any faults. The nodes have been studied so that they can intelligently implement mutual collaboration strategies in order to optimize operations and manage any problems due, for example, to infrastructure. The effectiveness of long-range, low-power communication technology, LoRaWAN was also tested within the project, which was therefore integrated within the fog computing platform. The nodes were developed thanks to the use of different open hardware and open source technologies. The solution for the fog node is based on microcontrollers within which a scalable modular software framework has been designed and installed to deal with activities such as: