From Integration Profiles to Interoperability Testing for Smart Energy Systems at Connectathon Energy

Population growth and city expansion in developing countries require traditional urban planning practices to be transformed in order to tackle climate change and follow Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agendas. Almost every expert in the urban sector believes that future cities should be sustainable, smart, and environmentally friendly, where energy is one of the most critical factors to achieve these goals. They also agree that smart and sustainable energy provision for cities requires a comprehensive and responsive legal and policy framework to be in place at the national level. However, this research’s findings reveal a lack of such frameworks for this group of countries. Considering the challenges and unique nature of Low-Income-Developing (LID) countries, there should be a framework based on the realities in these countries. In this research, key challenges of urban and energy sectors of LID countries, specifically Afghanistan, are identified, and a framework for the integration of sustainable and smart energy in the urban planning processes for LID countries is proposed. To make it easily replicable and adaptable for LID countries, the proposed framework is studied and analyzed around Afghanistan’s urban and energy sectors. This is one of the few frameworks of its kind for LID economies to the best of the authors’ knowledge. This framework lays a solid foundation for sustainable and smart energy integration in the urban planning process of developing countries. This study highlights that sustainable and smart energy systems could ensure climate change mitigation and economic growth enhancement but require close cross-sectoral coordination and policy maker’s commitments and involvement. This research will help many existing and emerging cities in the LID countries’ worldwide use and benefit from the proposed framework in their urban planning processes. It also enables policymakers, urban planners and designers, municipalities leadership, and other stakeholders of the urban, energy, and environment sectors to work together and make smart and rational decisions for the future of their cities and lead them towards smart and sustainable cities.

A bi-stage multi-objectives optimization of smart multi energy system with active consumers

Due to the unsustainability of fossil fuels and the adverse impacts on the environment, along with the rapid growing energy demands, smart energy becomes a new trend. To achieve its carbon peak and neutrality targets in China, smart Energy is the main battlefield, electricity is the main force, and the construction of a new power system is an important content of the construction of smart energy system. The 2nd International Conference on Smart Energy and New Power Systems (SENPS2024) is to promote research and developmental activities in Smart Energy and New Power Systems by creating a platform to promote scientific information interchange between researchers, developers, engineers, students, and practitioners working all around the world. The conference will also make it an ideal platform for people to share views and experiences in related areas. With all contributions from the participants, 23 papers are final accepted from 88 submissions. Those accepted ones are well categorized into four sectors as follows: Smart Energy, Smart Grid, Power Electronics Technologies and New power system. We wish to show our sincere appreciations to Hunan University of Technology, Changsha Normal University, CRRC Zhuzhou Institute Co., Ltd which provided various platform to promote this conference with nice service. We are also thankful to the authors and reviewers for their contributions in this volume. We are also very much thankful to the organizations for contributing their time and expertise to maintain the quality of this proceeding. This time the conference service is supported by Digital Intelligence Academic Service Innovation Team from Changsha Normal University and funded by Research on the construction of international promotion platform for Chinese educational brands - A case study on the organization and management of international academic conferences from China Education Association for International Exchange. Last but not least, we especially thanks to the team of IOP Conference Publishing team for support to bring out these proceedings of this conference. we will feel honorable to have your continuous attention and attendance for our next edition of SENPS. List of Conference committee are available in this Pdf.

Post COVID-19 ENERGY sustainability and carbon emissions neutrality

274 July/August 2002 It is hard to imagine worldwide agreement on ways to link information systems while we struggle with local systems that can't communicate. However, this vision is coming closer to reality as a result of a joint initiative sponsored by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). The Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) initiative promotes coordinated use of established communications standards such as HL7 and DICOM to address specific integration needs. Not even the most advanced institutions have begun to realize the full potential of computer systems to reduce medical errors, improve the efficiency of care providers, and enhance the overall quality of clinical care. To do so, health care demands a framework for information sharing that meets the needs of care providers as well as patients—and gains acceptance among the companies that build the systems they rely on. Standards provide the foundation for such a framework, but alone do not solve the problem. In any standard there may be gaps, options, and room for conflicting interpretations. No standard could map perfectly to the complex and ever-changing information domain of a health care enterprise. Filling the gap between standards and systems implementation has, until now, required expensive, site-specific interface development to integrate even standards-compliant systems. To close that gap, a process for building a detailed framework for the implementation of standards is needed. IHE provides that process. Clinicians, administrators, and other health care professionals are frustrated by computer systems that don't effectively share information. They envision a day when vital information can be passed seamlessly from system to system within and across departments and made available as needed at the point of care. The IHE initiative aims to make this vision a reality. IHE integration profiles organize the integration capabilities needed to address specific patient care needs. Integration profiles offer a convenient way for vendors and users to reference the functionality defined in the IHE Technical Framework without having to restate all of the detail. They describe clinical information and workflow needs and specify the functional units (actors), and transactions required to address them. Volunteer members of HIMSS and RSNA, including radiologists and other clinicians, health care executives, and information technology experts, play a key role in guiding the development of IHE and determining priorities for integration. Vendor representatives also collaborate in the process, which is making progress toward removing the obstacles to integration and optimal patient care. During the third year of the initiative, which commenced at the HIMSS Annual Conference and Exhibition this February in Atlanta, 33 companies representing 68 systems completed the testing process “Envision a day when vital information can be passed seamlessly from system to system within and across departments and made available as needed at the point of care.”

To explain the common conformance and interoperability testing requirements of eHealth applications through two case studies; one using a prominent eHealth messaging standard, namely HL7 v3 [1], and the other using Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) [2] Profiles and to describe how these testing requirements can be addressed through an automated, modular and scenario-based testing framework, namely TestBATN. Summarizing the conformance testing requirements of HL7 v3 messages. Illustrating the interoperability testing requirements of IHE Profiles through a scenario based on the IHE XDS, IHE XDS-MS and IHE PIX profiles. Explaining how these requirements can be handled through a dynamic and configurable test framework addressing all the layers in the interoperability stack within a single test scenario. Conformance and interoperability testing are necessary to maintain correct information exchange as the correctness of the exchanged data is essential in the healthcare domain. There are many standards used in eHealth that the applications need to conform. Additionally, there are profiling initiatives such as IHE and Continua Health Alliance which publish integration profiles addressing a specific clinical need or a use case and describe how to combine or use the existing standards to provide interoperability. However, as the results of our case studies demonstrate, there are many commonalities in the conformance and interoperability testing requirements of these standards and profiles and therefore an integrated testing environment is needed. Our main conclusion is that rather than having individual testing tools for each standard or initiative, a generic and modular test framework exploiting the commonalities in the testing processes and fostering reusability of modular, pluggable testing components will improve the efficiency of testing. Through the TestBATN framework, we describe how this modularity can be achieved by providing common interfaces facilitating the development of adaptors which allows different testing components to be plugged into the system.

Clinical engineers face technical challenges and opportunities in healthcare technology as results of changing focus in healthcare and the computerization and interconnection of medical devices and systems. Combined, these trends will increasingly move us away from the traditional "bricks and mortar" hospitals and physician's offices and move us toward their virtual successors. Ultimately, diagnosis and treatment will take place at an earlier stage. A major challenge to achieving this goal has been the diversity of current healthcare technologies and the paucity of technical standards for exchanging useful information between different medical devices. The consequence is a technical "Tower of Babel", where these disparate devices lack a common means of communication. The answer to this challenge is an initiative known as Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE). IHE brought together healthcare information and medical imaging systems industry members "to agree upon, document, and demonstrate standards-based methods of sharing information in support of optimal patient care". By developing integration profiles that detail core processes such as scheduled workflow, image presentation, information access, record retrieval, reporting, and charge posting and adopting existing standards. IHE defines guidelines that medical device manufacturers can follow to ensure their device will interface and effectively communicate with a device from another manufacturer. IHE holds promise to transform the existing technical "Tower of Babel" into sets of integration profiles that will facilitate interoperability of medical devices. The success of IHE will lead to technological integration and thereby meet one of the most critical challenges as healthcare systems move to the next level.

To address the challenges of assessing information security risks in smart energy systems, this study proposes a multi-attribute decision support method based on interval type-2 fuzzy numbers (IT2TrFN). First, expert questionnaires were designed to gather insights from eight specialists in the fields of smart energy and safety engineering. Linguistic terms associated with IT2TrFN were employed to evaluate indicators, converting expert judgments into fuzzy numerical values while ensuring data reliability through consistency measurements. Subsequently, a decision hierarchy structure and an expert weight allocation model were developed. By utilizing the score and accuracy functions of IT2TrFN, the study determined positive and negative ideal solutions to rank and prioritize the evaluation criteria. Key influencing factors identified include the rate of excessive initial investment, regulatory stringency, information security standards, environmental pollution pressure, and incident response timeliness. The overall risk index was calculated as 0.5839, indicating a moderate level of information security risk in the evaluated region. To validate the robustness of the model, sensitivity analyses were conducted by varying IT2FWA (Weighted aggregated operator) and IT2FGA (Weighted geometric operator) operator selections and adjusting weight coefficients. The results reveal that key indicators exhibit high risk under different scenarios. This method provides an innovative tool for the scientific evaluation of information security risks in smart energy systems, laying a solid theoretical foundation for broader regional applications and the expansion of assessment criteria.

Smart energy systems and 4th generation district heating

Smart grids are considered important building blocks of a future energy system that facilitates integration of massive distributed energy resources like gas-fired cogeneration (CHP). The latter produces thermal and electric power together and as such reinforces the interaction between the gas and electricity-distribution systems. Thermal storage makes up the key-source of flexibility that allows decoupling the electricity production from the heat demand. However, smart grids focus on electricity, often disregarding the role of gas and thermal storage in overall smart energy systems. We find that the technical impact of a massive introduction of CHP on the gas-distribution network is limited in most cases, even providing opportunities to free up capacity. Taking the consumer's viewpoint, we highlight the economic importance of the thermal storage tank, which requires a thermal capacity of two to three times the hourly thermal power output of the CHP to optimize electric power production and limit thermal losses. Further increasing the storage tank size can increase the gas-distribution capacity that can be marketed by the distribution system operator, but practical constraints in terms of dedicated land area have to be considered as well.

Consumer ownership, natural monopolies and transition to 100% renewable energy systems

With the deep integration of advanced information technologies such as artificial intelligence and traditional energy technologies, smart energy systems have been proposed as a method to provide the best solution for the coordination, balance, and control of the entire energy system. As a new way of energy balance and interaction in the user side energy market, peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity transaction can effectively promote energy sharing within the user group and improve the economic benefits of users participating in the energy market. Reinforcement learning (RL) is an artificial intelligence method in which agents continuously acquire relevant experience and knowledge during the interaction with the environment, automatically update their decision-making behavior, and achieve maximum return. It is suitable for P2P transaction decision analysis of small-scale users in the context of smart energy. Firstly, this paper establishes a P2P transaction model that includes a participant model, equipment model and price model. Secondly, the transaction problem is equivalent to a Markov decision process (MDP) and each learning element model is established. Then, the MDP problem is solved and analyzed using SARSA RL algorithm with average discrete processing. Finally, a case study of a community with multiple users is conducted to verify the effectiveness, economy, and security of RL method in solving energy storage action selection and transaction decision problems of energy storage users.

Integrating smart manufacturing ecosystems with industrial-grade smart energy and building automation systems enables real-time adaptation to changes in demands and factory conditions, the supply chain, and the needs of customers and society. However, integrating, managing, and controlling data exchange usually incurs high overheads in such a collaborative industrial environment. Smart home IoT technologies are a cost-effective solution for smart energy and building automation systems; they are not fully interoperable with industrial IoT technologies. This paper presents a mechanism to solve this interoperability problem using the Eclipse Arrowhead framework. The proposed solution provides a microservice-oriented architecture to develop protocol-specific smart adapter systems for the Arrowhead framework. These smart adapter systems provide seamless and highly scalable integrations between smart home and industrial IoT technologies. Our solution enables smart manufacturing ecosystems to meet Industry 5.0’s core values and reduce their carbon footprint to save the planet. We present the performance of our solution using an example from a real-world use case of a smart heating system scenario in a smart factory.

Digital Twins are becoming central enablers of Europe’s digital and green transitions, yet their data-intensive and autonomous nature exposes them to one of the most complex regulatory environments in the world. This article presents a comprehensive scoping review of how six principal European digital laws—the General Data Protection Regulation, Data Governance Act, Data Act, Artificial Intelligence Act, NIS2 Directive, and Cyber Resilience Act—jointly govern the design, deployment, and operation of Digital Twin systems. Building on the PRISMA-ScR methodology, the study constructs a Unified Digital Twin Compliance Framework (UDTCF) that consolidates overlapping obligations across data governance, privacy, cybersecurity, transparency, interoperability, and ethical responsibility. The framework is operationalised through a Digital Twin Compliance Evaluation Matrix (DTCEM) that enables qualitative assessment of compliance maturity in research and innovation projects. Applying these tools to representative European cases in Smart Cities, Industrial Manufacturing, Transportation, and Energy Systems reveals strong convergence in data governance, security, and interoperability, but also persistent gaps in the transparency, explainability, and accountability of AI-driven components. The findings demonstrate that European digital legislation forms a coherent yet fragmented ecosystem that increasingly requires integration through compliance-by-design methodologies. The article concludes that Digital Twins can act not only as regulated technologies but also as compliance infrastructures themselves, embedding legal, ethical, and technical safeguards that reinforce Europe’s vision for trustworthy, resilient, and human-centric digital transformation.

In this study, we demonstrate that a digital colorimetric sensor platform can transform a conventional energy system, such as gas‐insulated switchgear (GIS) into a smart green energy system. Our sensor platform consists of a colorimetric sensor film (CSF), an array of silicon photodiodes, and a low‐power‐driven fiber optical photodiode with a wireless communication protocol integrated into an information network. The photodiode measures the transmitted light of the color‐variable CSF when exposed to sulfur dioxide (SO2) gas, a decomposition by‐product of the sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) gas in GIS. We report the electrical photocurrent measurement through the CSF can measure the concentration of SO2 gas via remote and real‐time monitoring and shows a comparable behavior to UV–Vis absorption measurement. The limit of detection of the sensor, 0.78 ppm is sufficient to analyze the GIS insulation deterioration allowing green energy systems.image