Lecturers
Antonello Monti, Ferdinanda Ponci, Marco Cupelli, RWTH Aachen
Thomas Strasser, Austrian Institute of Technology

Future power systems have to integrate a higher amount of distributed, renewable energy resources to cope with a growing electricity demand, while at the same time trying to reduce emission of greenhouse gases. In addition, power system operators are nowadays confronted with further challenges due to the highly dynamic and stochastic behaviour of renewable generators (solar, wind, small hydro, etc.) and the need to integrate controllable loads (electric vehicles, smart buildings, energy storage systems, etc.). Furthermore, due to ongoing changes to framework conditions and regulatory rules, technology developments (development of new grid components and services) and the liberalization of energy markets, the resulting design and operation of the future electric energy system has to be modified. 
Sophisticated (systems and component) design approaches, intelligent information and communication architectures, and distributed automation concepts provide ways to cope with the above-mentioned challenges and to turn the existing power system into an intelligent entity, that is, a “Cyber- 
Physical Energy System (CPES)” (also known as “Smart Grid”). 
While reaping the benefits that come along with intelligent solutions, it is, however, expected that due to the considerably higher complexity of such solutions, validation and testing will play a significantly larger role in the development of future technology. As it stands, the first demonstration projects for smart grid technologies have been successfully completed; it follows that there is a high probability of key findings and achieved results being integrated in new and existing products, solutions and services of manufacturers and system integrators. Up until now, proper validation and testing methods and a suitably corresponding integrated Research Infrastructure (RI) for smart grids is neither fully available nor easily accessible which fulfils the following main requirements: 
- A cyber-physical, multi-domain approach for analysing and validating CPES at the system level is today missing; existing methods are mainly focusing on the component level; system integration topics including analysis and evaluation are not yet addressed in a holistic manner. 
- A holistic validation framework (including analysis and evaluation/benchmark criteria) and the corresponding RI with proper methods and tools needs to be developed. 
- Harmonized and standardized evaluation procedures need to be developed. 
- Well-educated professionals, engineers and researchers that understand smart grid systems in a cyber-physical manner need to be trained on a broad scale.