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Smart Grid

Article on Smart Cities: Best of 2016 Australian Quarterly

I’m very glad to share that Australian Quarterly has included my article on Smart Cities in the special edition of the best articles published in 2016. Apart from an endorsement of the  potential value of the article on an important topic like Smart Cities, the best part of this news is that the special edition is completely free for distribution that is why I have attached it here for download . This article provides a vision and strategies for conceiving and implementing projects that can contribute to building and evolving Smart Cities, which is an umbrella term used for socio-technical innovation for improving the liveability of cities, regions, and suburbs. In this article, I have particularly emphasise the importance of building and sustaining strong collaborative ties among governments, councils, private sectors, and universities for co-conceiving and materialising Smart Cities initiatives and projects. I have particularly highlighted the role and importance of Smart Campus as an experimental testbed for supporting the collaborations for Smart Cities projects.Read More »Article on Smart Cities: Best of 2016 Australian Quarterly

German-Australia Chamber’s Smart Energy Management Seminar

Energy monitoring and management systems play a vital role in helping achieve the strategic as well as operational goals for Smart Cities/Smart Buildings. Whilst sustainability friendly mans of generating energy can go a long way of making a country/city/region carbon neutral, which is an agenda of any smart city initiative, energy monitoring and management systems can contribute significantly by brining innovation in energy distribution and utilisation. Having noticed our Smart Cities initiative‘s increasing activities and widespread engagements in not only South Australia but other parts of the country, the German-Australian Chamber invited us to be a partner in the organisation of a seminar on “energy efficiency in buildings” on November 22, 2016. The draft of the program can be download here. According to the program, I’ll be giving an opening talk, Smart Cities Initiatives and Supporting Energy Management Systems, for which I’ll be relying on our research and development activities on Smart Cities related initiatives and projects over the last 18 months. The seminar’s goal is to initiative and groom productive and fruitful dialogue between German companies and Australian  academic institutions in order to Read More »German-Australia Chamber’s Smart Energy Management Seminar

Workshop on Smart Cities Research Collaboration With Councils/Government

We have entered in an exciting phase of our smart cities research and development initiative. We have been having a series of very productive and fruitful workshops with internal and external stakeholders to gather ideas, suggestions, and proposals from a wide variety of colleagues and partners (current and potential) for firming up the foundations and structure of our initiative. Last week (October 27), we organised a workshop involving more than a dozen participants from local councils and different agencies of the state department. The purpose of the workshop was to brainstorming and organise the ideas and needs of the councils/government that can be converted into researchable projects to support innovation and entrepreneurship in Adelaide in the area of Smart Cities. Our strong and ongoing collaboration with the Adelaide Smart Cities Studio was hugely helpful in an offer to host the event in one of the buildings of the council, next door to the Adelaide Smart City Studio, and the Studio’s manager Beth Worrall was extremely helpful and actively engaged in the workshop. We invited representatives from several councilsRead More »Workshop on Smart Cities Research Collaboration With Councils/Government

A Knowledge Base for Microgrid Security Risk Analysis

Through a team of students from the Masters of Software Engineering ME (Software), we started the design and implementation of the first phase of our solution aimed at providing a knowledge-based support for Microgrid security risk analysis. The project was motivated by an increasing realisation that a large number of energy systems are made of multiple sources of energy generation and distribution. Now more and more energy distribution companies are focused on solutions with two-ways of energy movement – energy supply from the energy distribution companies from their conventional or smart grids or energy supply from small, independent energy generators through Microgrids. Whilst a Microgrid provides promising solutions for modernising energy solutions aimed at addressing contemporary challenges, there are several types of challenges involved in designing, building, and operating Microgrids integrated into an energy ecosystem.Read More »A Knowledge Base for Microgrid Security Risk Analysis

Modeling Security-Sensitive Architecture of Systems-of-Systems

An increasing number of software systems are considered Software Intensive Systems of Systems (SiSoS), which consist of dozens of constituent systems. Systems are interconnected using private or public networks, which can be prime target for security attacks. Hence, securing SiSoS is a huge challenge and an emerging areas of research and development. SoS can have several applications domains that can range from smart cities, to defence systems, and industrial control systems. Modeling of and reasoning of security-sensitive architecture of software intensive systems is a challenging piece of work but several modelling approaches and tooling support have been developed. However, there has been no signifiant effort to develop appropriate modelling approach and associated infrastructure for modeling security-senstive architecture of SoS. Led by our collaboratives in France, we have recently developed an approach and tool support for supporting seccutiry-senstive architecture design and analysis .Read More »Modeling Security-Sensitive Architecture of Systems-of-Systems

Talk at NEC & IDC Event on Smarter and Safer Societies

Smart Cities initiatives can mean different things to different people and solutions providers. However, there is no doubt that a smart city solution should not only focus on providing the core service but should also contribute to the safety of the users of a service. That is why quite a lot of smart cities solutions are being presented from safety perspective as well – smart cities ought to be safer cities. I was honoured to be invited to present our initiative on Smart Cities R&D and innovation at an event co-organised by NEC and IDC – the event was titled, “Smarter and Safer Society – How ICT makes Government and Enterprise work smarter ”. It was a great get together where different speakers and panelists were enthusiastically presenting their visions, understanding, and observations about smart cities initiatives and solutions. I really enjoyed the talks, dialogues between panelist and audience. I spoke about our initiative on setting up an interdisciplinary centre for research, development, and innovation that can lead to citizen-inspired socio-technical solutions for making a city smarter. Here are the presentation that I used for supporting the talk and following is the abstract of my talk.
Read More »Talk at NEC & IDC Event on Smarter and Safer Societies

Smart Cities: Cyber Security and Privacy

Whilst the “Smart City” phenomenon is increasingly becoming a popular term among almost all circles of everyday life, the real progress on conceiving, devising, deploying and evolving services for “Smart City” remains slow. Governments, councils, and private sectors appear to be finding different ways of capitalising on the popularity and potential of “Smart City” phenomenon to address the challenges of increasing urbanisation. However, citizens and civil rights groups remain skeptical about the potential privacy violations of the data that need to be captured and analysed for providing the “Smart City” services and the security aspects those services in the face of persistent cyber attacks. And these two concerns are some of the biggest issues in the success of a “Smart City” initiative. Recently, our “Smart City” initiative was covered by the Guardian news paper and the ABC News and both of the media venues focused on the privacy issues involved in the “Smart City” projects.

Read More »Smart Cities: Cyber Security and Privacy

Smart Campus: Model Driven Security for Systems of Systems

Socio-technical systems underpinning smart and connected cities are good examples of systems of systems – where each constituent system act and behave independents but these systems are connected with each other and provide each other different services. Security is one of the key aspects of systems of systems, e.g., smart city systems or smart campus systems. It is extremely complex and challenging undertaking to model and analyse a secure systems of systems. Model Driven Engineering (MDE) is expected to bring much needed support to bring effectiveness and efficiency in terms of automating some of the tedious and error-prone tasks. To support a MDE approach to secure smart cities systems, we need appropriate meta-models and suitable tools that can convert the meta-models in graphical editors that can support the modelling and analysis of secure smart cities applications. In collaboration with researchers from France, we have been working on a project aimed at developing graphical editors and model cases of secure systems in a smart cities, or smart campus. Apart from senior researchers from Adelaide and France, Zi Yang Pang has been working on summer scholarship on this project. The project has the following goals and scope and we are hoping to apply the meta-model language for secure smart cities systems very soon and afterwards we plan to extend the tools to provide end-to-end support. Read More »Smart Campus: Model Driven Security for Systems of Systems

Towards a Cyber Security Assessment Framework for Smart Grid

Modern energy systems are interconnected through public and private networks, hence, such systems can be target of cyber attacks – Smart Grid is an example of a system of systems which can be targeted for security breaches. Smart grid systems may be targeted using the vulnerabilities are unknown, zero day attacks. It is important to have a comprehensive support infrastructure for identifying and mitigating potential risks to smart grid systems. However, such an infrastructure should be developed and evaluated after having a deep understanding of the existing practices and processes of managing cyber security risk in the energy sector for smart grid systems. I’ve recently supervised a project that was aimed at addressing the challenges, tends, and requirements in the Danish electricity sector.Read More »Towards a Cyber Security Assessment Framework for Smart Grid