Advanced Control in the Energy Sector

Dear Colleagues,

Advanced control has played an important role in maintaining the production and quality of processes at an optimal level. This is mainly due to the stabilizing effect of well-designed control systems and their ability to respond to process disturbances. The same agrees with the production and consumption of energy, where the requirements for control are even tighter than in production processes because of high requirements for safety and security.

Technological development has also changed the overall picture in the energy sector. Moving from fossil fuels to more sustainable energy production—bio, solar, wind and tidal—has brought along new possibilities, and has also meant new challenges for operation, monitoring and control. On the one hand, production is concentrated on bigger units, and on the other hand, distributed production is necessary to take advantage of locally-available fuels, when the transportation of these fuels is not economically or environmentally feasible. This leads to increasing requirements for coordination and security aspects that are present in everyday life, e.g., in district heating systems, farm energy production, and secure energy for hospitals, just to give a few examples. Different forms of bioenergy need different modelling and control skills and understanding of the phenomena occurring in recently developed processes. Hydrogen economy leads to inevitable changes even in our infrastructure and these processes also require efficient control.

Control technologies also change rapidly. Communications systems rely more and more on wireless technologies and web-based approaches. This is a grand challenge for energy production, where the safety solutions have favored wired systems. Web-based systems also have good positive contributions. IoT development makes the collection of huge amounts of on-line measurements possible, together with the possibilities of fusing these with data coming from other sources. This makes, e.g., the forecasting of future energy consumption easier in smart city systems, based on customer behaviors. This also means that we are facing problems of data privacy and ownership.

It is my pleasure to invite you to submit original research papers, short communications or state-of-the-art reviews within the scope of this Special Issue. Contributions can include one or more of the below-mentioned topics, but are not limited to them.

Prof. Kauko Leiviskä
Guest Editor

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