NOWork at UiT Narvik hits international front pages
Technology developed at UiT Narvik reaches the front page of Innovation News Network in June.The Innovation News Network promotes work that was done in the E-Regio project together with Smart Innovation Norway in Halden and Skagerak, the energy company, in Porsgrunn, Norway. UiT was engaged due to its earlier work on multi-agent systems and simulations on energy markets. This technology was further developed in the Interreg funded project, Smart Charge. E-Regio created a chance for the AI group to test the technology beyond a simulated world and has been used to manage a local energy market at Skagerak soccer stadium. Here a giant facility for local energy production based on solar panels and 1000 kWh of storage has been built. An agent represents a device such as a battery, PV panel or the grid. Based on predictions made on future supply and consumption as well as storage level the agents engage in internal trade that seeks to improve local self-consumption and cut costs and improve profits for the players involved in this market. Several R&D initiatives have explored similar concepts before, but with the Skagerak case UiT Narvik shows that it is possible to employ these type of agents in real-world settings too.
The Innovation Network is an international publisher with readers all over the world.
The article, originally meant as a disimination task within the E-Regio project stirred interest far beyond Norway and hit the front pages which in turn
Over the years UiT Narvik has accumulated a lot of knowledge on intelligent agent systems. An important field of research is multi-agent systems that can cooperate, engage each other and learn collectively or by themselves. As computers become more and more ubquitous and with Internet of Things (IoT) growing fast distributed computing and processing at the edge of the network becomes ever more important. The AI Group in Narvik has adopted the position that nobody can embrace every sensor or device that is emerging. We will face a "bottom up" development. Using devices that are controlled by dedicated agetns that can also relate to others through simple protocols at different levels promises a way to manage a diverse IoT world. Besides, this form of distributed computing does make sense in terms of societal and busieness oriented terms. It makes it harder for platform owners to monopolize applications and data in their clouds. For minor players this could be a good thing. The AI Group targets multiple types of applications for the technology that has been developed, smart city, the building and housing industry, traffic, logistics, industrial robotics, energy and health care.
Last updated: 13.08.2020 14:22