Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine
Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance
Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust
Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine
Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History
Luxembourg Centre for European Law
Luxembourg Centre for Socio-Environmental Systems
The Doctoral School in Sciences and Engineering is happy to invite you to VAN STIPHOUDT Christine’s defence entitled
System integration and interaction design for industrial demand response
Supervisor: Prof Gilbert FRIDGEN
The energy sector is undergoing a profound transformation driven by the increased integration of renewable electricity generation, decentralization, and electrification.
These developments on both the generation and consumption sides are pushing the electricity grid to its operational limits, resulting in voltage instability and network congestion. Furthermore, digital transformation is enabling the evolution of traditional
power grids into smart grids, allowing bidirectional information exchange through the integration of information and communication technologies. Industrial consumers can contribute to providing the required system flexibility through demand response, adjusting their electricity consumption in response to external signals.
However, coordinating such flexibility offerings requires the seamless integration and interaction of systems operated by different actors. Current integration and interaction solutions are often custom-built, which can lead to vendor lock-in
and high implementation costs.
To address these challenges, I investigate in this dissertation system integration and interaction solutions that support interoperable information exchanges for industrial demand response.
The dissertation comprises seven publications, which collectively contribute to both descriptive and prescriptive knowledge.
The work is structured around three interrelated research directions: system integration, system interaction, and use of exchanged flexibility information. Two publications address system integration through the design of a digital service platform concept to enable and streamline automated industrial demand response.
Another two publications focus on system interaction, analyzing existing evaluation approaches for information and data model specifications used in information exchanges, and proposing a novel evaluation method.
The remaining three publications explore the use of exchanged information in flexibility service offerings as part of demand response programs. Two of them propose a scheduling tool designed to support participation in implicit demand response programs. The third assesses the effectiveness of the design of integrated European balancing markets and their associated
platforms, as components of explicit demand response programs, in promoting industrial demand response.
Overall, this thesis provides a foundation for designing interoperable system integration and interaction solutions that enable industrial demand response, offering conceptual architectures and evaluation methods.