Researchers at ECS-Electronics and Computer Science have developed a mechanism which uses smart computerised agents to control energy storage devices in the home, resulting in energy savings of up to 16 per cent.

In a paper entitled "Decentralised Control of Micro-Storage in the Smart Grid", which will be delivered at the Twenty-Fifth Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-11) in San Francisco on Thursday (11 August), Dr Thomas Voice describes how he and his colleagues developed a novel decentralised control mechanism to manage micro-storage in the smart grid.

The researchers developed a completely decentralised mechanism which uses agent-based techniques to allow energy suppliers to manage the demand from their consumers, which, in turn, allows them to reduce their wholesale purchasing costs, yielding savings of up to 16 per cent in energy cost for consumers using devices with an average capacity of 10 kWh.

The researchers’ approach involves using a real-time pricing scheme that is broadcast to consumers in advance of each daily period. Computerised agents then buy, sell, and store energy on behalf of the home-owners in order to minimise their net electricity costs. By adjusting the pricing scheme to match the conditions on the wholesale market, the supplier is able to ensure that, as a whole, consumer agents converge to a stable and efficient equilibrium where costs and carbon emissions are minimised.

“In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for the decentralised control of widespread micro-storage in the smart grid,” said Dr Voice. “We see this as an important step to showing that the adoption of widespread, supplier-managed home energy micro-storage is a practical desirable technology to develop for the benefit of both suppliers and consumers. Using the techniques described in this paper, we can envisage energy suppliers providing new tariffs that will incentivise consumers to buy affordable small scale storage devices. In turn this will allow suppliers to manage aggregate load profiles, improve efficiency and reduce carbon output.”

This work as carried out as part of the industrially-funded IDEAS project, led by Dr Alex Rogers and Professor Nick Jennings of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group at ECS, University of Southampton.

Decentralised Control of Micro-Storage in the Smart Grid

The University of Southampton is one of six universities in the UK which will be hosting this year's 'Silicon Valley comes to the UK' appathon event.

Silicon Valley comes to the UK (SVc2UK), announces a month-long, multi-site competitio. Dubbed the SVc2UK Appathon, the competition supports and encourages university students to use government data to "hack" together innovative consumer applications in Healthcare, Education, and the Environment. This competition allows students to unlock the power of government data to make a positive social impact and to enhance the data's accessibility to peers, parents, and grandparents. This ambitious initiative represents the UK's largest ever mobilisation of students to create apps. We don't know yet what they will create, but we are hoping for a 'good school's guide’ where you can find out where the good schools are near you, a 'good doctor's guide’. where you can find a doctor near you, and a 'clean city guide' where you can find the cleanest city near you - or the dirtiest!

This national ‘coding competition’ helps to address the void that organizers believe exists in most university curricula, creating a real world opportunity for those developers with the ambition, appetite and aptitude to code and build applications that can have real value to users. With support, not only from their peers, but the wider technology community, and a network of mentors, these students will be able to take control of, and enhance, their own education outside of the classroom and make a difference.

Continuing the historic success of SVc2UK, approximately 1,500 students from 15 universities across the UK are expected to be drawn “like magnets” to six UK locations including Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, Sheffield, Southampton and London to take part in the Appathons. Full access to the data and details of participating universities and hosts can be found here.

The SVc2UK Appathons will run during early October and are open to university students across the country. The competition has the full support of Downing Street, which will supply technical guru’s from data.gov.uk. In addition, pretty much the whole technology industry is lending support to the effort. University students who enter the competition have until 23 October to submit their apps to be judged by leading global entrepreneurial icons including Reid Hoffman, Joi Ito and more.

The winners of the SVc2UK Appathon will attend an awards ceremony in November as part of ‘Silicon Valley comes to the UK’ and 9 winners will be invited to take part in a road trip to Silicon Valley followed by the legendary South by Southwest Conference early next year. The Appathon will conclude with winning developers, coming to London, for the finale: a show-and-tell event where the developers will explain and demonstrate their efforts to a selected audience of their peers, politicians, advisers, civil servants, and the press.

Prime Minister David Cameron says: "Silicon Valley comes to the UK is one of the most important inward investment events of the year, bringing leading Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors together with British technology companies to spark new connections and investments. As I've said before, I am committed to making the UK the best place in the world to start, run and grow a high tech company. That's why we have introduced more generous tax breaks for early stage investment, accepted the recommendations of the Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property, launched the Entrepreneur Visa, as well as a host of other policy changes. A key part of this technology agenda is our commitment to open data. Over the past 18 months we have set a huge amount of government data free, and we are committed to going even further in the months ahead.

"I warmly welcome the news that Silicon Valley comes to the UK is organising a competition to reward the creative use of government data. This type of innovation can produce new applications and services that generate significant social and economic benefits, and I'm looking forward to seeing the entries sent in by coders across the UK."

Professor Nigel Shadbolt of ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and co-founder of data.gov.uk and Transparency Board Member, comments: "One of the reasons we make Government Data openly available is to create the conditions for innovation. I have no doubt that this programme of events will see remarkable applications emerge - applications that will showcase not just our data but the talent of our students."

University students have until 23 October to show what they can do, but applications to attend an appathon (including the Southampton event, hosted by ECS), are open now and developers can start coding.

Apply to participate in one of the SVC2UK appathons - including Southampton!

This is the first time that Southampton has taken part in this annual competition. The Southampton appathon for Silicon Valley comes to the UK takes place on Saturday and Sunday 15 and 16 October, and will be hosted by ECS-Electronics and Computer Science in the Zepler and Mountbatten Buildings on the Highfield Campus.

Chris Gutteridge is a member of the organizing committee: "We are expecting a really lively event", he says, "and we know that there are a lot of people on campus who are already working with open data and creating apps - we are looking forward to meeting you all at our Appathon! But the event is open to everyone who is keen to see the value of open data and to work on ways that it can be used to create really valuable information." A team of mentors will also be on hand to provide advice and support to all the teams.

Sign up for the Southampton event on 15 and 16 October.

For further information contact Chris Gutteridge (Appathon organization) or Joyce Lewis (media).

Researchers from the ORCHID project will present their work on the use of computerised agents for home energy management and disaster responses this week at TechWorld, the UK's leading technology event.

A team led by Professor Nick Jennings and Dr Alex Rogers of ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton has been invited to present a poster at TechWorld (16-17 November) which focuses this year on Energy & Environment + Digital Connected World.

The poster - 'Human-Agent Collectives: From Foundations to Applications', focuses on the ORCHID researchers' work on the new science of human-agent collectives, which is exploring how computerised agents can interact with humans. The poster is a contender for the TechWorld University Excellence competition prize, which will be announced on Thursday (17 November).

"Working with computerised agents presents a number of challenges," said Professor Jennings, ORCHID Director. "One aspect is looking at the balance between humans that decide everything and software that decides everything. Another is looking at how agents fulfil tasks and disband when they are complete, and we are also looking at how agents can be encouraged to act in ways that generate socially desirable outcomes."

ORCHID is approaching these challenges by blending expertise in statistical information processing and multi-agent systems with human-agent interaction.

The five-year project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) with significant funding from its industrial partners, has applications in future energy systems, disaster management, and defence and security industries.

The project brings together over 60 researchers from a range of disciplines at the Universities of Southampton, Oxford and Nottingham, together with industrial partners at BAE Systems, PRI Ltd and the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR).

For further information about this news story contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.

A working robot controlled by a slime mould, and designed and built in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, will play a starring role in a major BBC4/Discovery Channel series to be aired from tomorrow (Tuesday 6 December).

Afterlife - The Strange Science of Decay, uses time-lapse cameras and specialist photography to capture the extraordinary way in which moulds, microbes and insects are able to break down our everyday things and allow new life to emerge from old.

Decay is something that many of us are repulsed by. But as the programme shows, it's a process that's vital in nature. And seen in close up, it has an unexpected and sometimes mesmerising beauty.

One aspect of the series shows the sometimes surprising ability of moulds to react to external stimuli. Earlier this year the production team spent a whole day in ECS, filming with Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner and Dr Soichiro Tsuda, who developed the slime-mould robot. Its central innovation is that its movements are controlled by a biochip which encapsulates a plasmodial cell of the slime mould Physarum polycephalum. An electronic interface enables the slime-mould cell to be connected to a computer in order to monitor local mechanical oscillations in the cell and it also provides stimulation for the slime-mould through light signals, causing the movement of the robot.

Dr Tsuda told the programme presenter, Dr George McGavin, that his inspiration for the robot had come from Dr Who’s Daleks! ‘It’s amazing that something that lives on dead trees can be used to control a machine,’ said Dr McGavin.

Physarum polycephalum has been used by Dr Zauner in research projects which have included both research students and undergraduates in ECS over a number of years: Gareth Jones, now a PhD student in ECS, developed the drive system of the robot in his Part III project and ECS Electronics graduate Paul Macey developed the interface to the slime-mould cell in his Part III project.

Klaus-Peter commented “There was a time when people in hot-air balloons looked at pigeons and realised that there is a radically different solution to the problem of flight. Now we marvel at nature's molecular computers which tell us that there are radically different solutions to the problem of information processing.

‘To harvest the potential of molecular computing, however, we need a generation of engineers with a broad concept of computation - I am therefore particularly pleased that the most important component of this robot was developed by an undergraduate, Paul Macey.”

Physarum is a popular model-organism in unconventional computing. It processes information from its environment in a distributed fashion that is not yet well understood.

‘Afterlife’ will be shown on 6, 7, and 9 December. It will examine many different aspects of decomposition and decay, including the complexity of organisms that are associated with decomposition, as well as exploring our attitudes to bacteria and the breakdown of bio-systems.

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For more information on this news story contact Joyce Lewis; tel. +44(0)23 8059 5453

If you are interested in PhD research in this area, you can find out more information on our Postgraduate Admissions pages.

An energy quiz which tests people's knowledge of the amount of energy used by devices and processes, such as lights on the Christmas tree, has been developed by researchers in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science, at the University of Southampton.

A team led by Dr Alex Rogers of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group developed The Energy Quiz for BT. The "game with a purpose" is intended to challenge BT employees to test their knowledge about energy.

The online quiz invites players to compete by answering 12 questions about energy comparisons. For example, it asks: which uses more energy - a Christmas tree with 100 lights continuously lit over the festive period or a dishwasher used once a week for month; or it compares heating water for a typical office for a year with a full Boeing 747 flying 400 miles; or heating a typical office for a day versus driving a car 100 miles.

BT has invited 200 employees to play the game and will roll it out to a further 3,500 in the next phase. “For us this is a way of conserving energy and we are finding that there is a deficiency of knowledge about energy among our employees,” said Simon Thompson, BT Chief Researcher. “We have also found that this kind of knowledge is often dull for people and they are not too interested in the statistics, so if we can encourage them to play a game around energy, it makes it more fun.”

According to Dr Rogers, The Energy Quiz can be tailored to specific work or home environments. With the release of an updated version worldwide this week, he plans to analyse the data to explore people’s misconceptions about energy.

“Our informal results so far show that people have a lot less intuition about energy than you would think,” he said. “People think that home consumption is always higher than driving their car to work and they often assume that appliances in the foreground that make a lot of noise or generate heat use more energy over the course of a year than something hidden away in the background.”

The Energy Quiz is one of a whole host of tools to monitor energy being developed at ECS. Dr Rogers and his team have also developed a range of tools to visualise the real-time carbon intensity of the UK electricity grid and they have developed tools for building energy monitoring. They are also developing computerised agents that can negotiate the charging of electric-powered cars in the most efficient way.

Researchers in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton have launched new software which allows organisations to develop evacuation plans using a combination of crowdsourcing and computer simulations.

Dr Sarvapali Ramchurn and a team of researchers in the ECS Agents, Interaction and Complexity research group have devised CollabMap and are now inviting organizations to volunteer information about connections to buildings and roads in their area, so that an evacuation plan can be created for them.

"CollabMap will be of interest to any organization that wants to develop an evacuation plan," said Dr Ramchurn. "We don't just use the information to build a map; we build a computer simulation that shows how people move around an area. Once people log in and draw routes, we aggregate the data to produce a high fidelity map over which we can simulate the movement of thousands of individuals across roads and open spaces, using parallel programming techniques."

CollabMap follows on from crowdsourcing and computer simulation work undertaken by Dr Ramchurn for Hampshire County Council with funding from EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) and the ORCHID project. ORCHID focuses on capitalising on human/computer interactions in disaster response scenarios.

One of the areas that will be mapped using CollabMap is the Fawley Oil Depot, near Southampton, which is the second biggest oil depot in the world and an area of high risk. Members of the public can take part in the CollabMap exercise, whether they know the area or not. Dr Ramchurn explains how it works on the CollabMap video on YouTube.

The Fawley mapping exercise will run for two months. Similar exercises can be run in any part of the world and can be used by organisations interested in their data being used for evacuation simulations.

The researchers involved in CollabMap are: Dr Ruben Stranders, Dr Trung Dong Huynh, and Dr Bing Shi.

For further information about this news story, contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453

Researchers from the University of Southampton will be collaborating with scientists from Masdar Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) to tackle the MyHeartMap Challenge, using social network and crowdsourcing.

Launched today (Tuesday 31 January), by the University of Pennsylvania, MyHeartMap Challenge invites members of the public to participate by submitting geo-tagged pictures of automated external defibrillators (AEDs) they see around Philadelphia, to create an effective location database of AEDs.

Masdar Institute’s computer scientists Dr Iyad Rahwan and Sohan D’Souza and University of Southampton computational game theorists James McInerney, Dr Victor Naroditskiy and Professor Nick Jennings, will join MIT Professor Sandy Pentland and UCSD Research Scientist Dr Manuel Cebrian, aiming to solve the MyHeartMap Challenge – and they are inviting social networkers to be involved in the activity.

It is estimated that around 300,000 people die every year in the US from sudden out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, some of which could be prevented through the timely use of a defibrillator. The University of Pennsylvania has observed that the inability to locate AEDs in such emergency situations greatly reduces their life-saving potential.

The team or individual that finds and photographs the most AEDs in Philadelphia County over the next six weeks will receive the grand prize of US$10,000. The competition has also flagged a number of ‘Golden AEDs’ - which have a US$50 bonus for the first team or individual who photographs and submits a Golden AED to the contest.

Dr Rahwan said: “Our team will use crowdsourcing to encourage people to report the location of AEDs, to verify other reports, and to recruit new participants. If we win, the money will be split among the participants who helped find defibrillators and the participants who recruited them.

Crowdsourcing provides an unprecedented ability to accomplish information-gathering tasks that require the involvement of a large number of people, often at geographically-spread locations. The success of a task relies on the ability to identify trustworthy information reports, while false reports are bound to appear either due to honest mistakes or sabotage attempts. This information verification problem is a difficult task, which, just like the information-gathering task, requires the involvement of a large number of people. Our team develops methods for solving this problem through crowdsourcing: we crowdsource not just for gathering, but also for verification of information."

Dr Rahwan recently co-authored a paper with the DARPA Network Challenge winners on their use of social networks to mobilize people to contribute to their team’s efforts. The paper was recently published in the prestigious Science journal.

Dr Naroditskiy said: “When your goal is to find as many AEDs within as large an area as possible, it would seem obvious that the best way to do that is to involve as many people in the search as possible. That’s what our team is trying to achieve through our expertise in social networking, mobilization and technology.”

The team will use the challenge to test some of their theoretical research on social network mobilization and incentivisation as well as verification, which adds a new layer of complexity not yet seen in crowdsourcing challenges.

Dr Cebrian said: “To most people social networks are just a way to talk to their friends or share videos. But to scientists like us, they represent a unique way to form large teams of people to work in a coordinated way to achieve difficult tasks. If we can harness that power of social networks, then we can enlist countless numbers of helpful volunteers to canvass Philadelphia and seek out and verify the AEDs that are currently not geo-tagged or on any map. This information can later prove to be lifesaving for someone going through sudden cardiac arrest.”

The team has launched its own website to attract team recruits who will help identify as many AEDs as possible. Visit http://scailab.media.mit.edu/heartcrowd to find out how you can be involved.

The MyHeartMap Challenge was launched on 31 January and will run through March 13.

For further information on this news story, contact Joyce Lewis; tel.+44(0)23 8059 5453.

A group of computer scientists from the UAE, US and UK have won a seemingly impossible worldwide challenge: to track down five ‘suspects’ of a jewel heist in five different cities within 12 hours. Their win redefines the limits of technology-mediated social mobilization and rapid information gathering.

Thee 'Tag Challenge', took place last month - a not-for-profit, independent event, aiming to “determine whether and how social media can be used to accomplish a realistic, time-sensitive, international law enforcement goal.” With a $5,000-reward, it constituted a simulated law enforcement search in five cities, namely Washington DC, New York City, London, Stockholm and Bratislava in Slovakia. Sponsored by the US State Department and the US Embassy in Prague, the challenge was created by a group of graduate students from six countries.

On the morning of 31 March, the organizers posted on the website a “mug shot” of each suspect at 8:00am local time. Using this photo alone, teams competed to be the first to successfully locate and photograph all ‘volunteer suspects’ and submit verifiable photographs to the contest organizers before 8:00pm local time. The enormity of the challenge meant that no single person or group of friends could tackle it on their own. Instead, winning was expected to rely on the ability to assemble a very large, ad-hoc team of spotters. A group of computer scientists provided the tool to do just that.

The winning team, dubbed CrowdScanner was built by computer scientists from the Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Southampton and University of California San Diego (UCSD). They located three targets in New York City, Washington DC, and Bratislava in Slovakia within the stipulated time. Two other teams were subsequently able to locate one suspect each, in New York and Bratislava. Suspects in Stockholm and London remained at large.

The team leader, Professor Iyad Rahwan of Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi, said: “What is most fascinating about our success, in my opinion, is the fact that none of us resides in any of the five cities. We all coordinated everything from behind our computer screens. This, to me, is what is special about the Internet. Our next step is to try to reconstruct exactly how we won, and what happened on the day of the challenge, and to learn something about what makes social media work in such amazing ways.” Dr Rahwan added: “Back in the 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted the legendary "six degrees of separation" experiment, which redefined our conception of social distance and taught us that everyone is only 6 steps away from everyone else on earth. The Tag Challenge is similarly redefining the limits of technology-mediated social mobilization and rapid information gathering. This has implications ranging from disaster response, to finding missing children, and much more.” Dr Victor Naroditskiy of the Agents, Interaction and Complexity group at the University of Southampton commented: “The TAG Challenge is a chance to study how information propagates through social networks and what it takes for a message to go viral. Our analysis of the data from the challenge is aimed at discerning general patterns that will help explain the successes and failures of social media in recent events.”

Members of the AIC group, led by Professor Nick Jennings in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science, have been working together on the use of crowdsourcing in information-gathering over the last year, particularly as regards theoretical work on game theory and incentives. The global group included research contacts around the world, resulting in a balanced mix of practical and game-theoretic expertise.

Professor Jennings leads the ORCHID project, funded by EPSRC and industrial partners, which aims to establish the science needed to understand, build and apply human-agent collectives (HACs), with crowdsourcing one of the major technologies under investigation and study.

For more information on this story, contact Joyce Lewis; tel.023 8059 5453.

Research on drone technology and disaster management led by Professor Nick Jennings and highlighted by the BBC could prove vital in improving the response of emergency services and populations to disaster management.

The technology being developed by Professor Jennings and his research team in ECS-Electronics and Computer Science, in association with BAE Systems and other collaborators, forms part of the large-scale ORCHID research project. This project evolved from the successful ALADDIN research collaboration which used agent technology to aid decision-making in decentralized, distributed information systems, such as the aftermath of a disaster.

Professor Jennings talked to the BBC about how the drones (autonomous flying vehicles) will be used: "Humans can do things like fill in maps based on what they see, starting from a blank map, which is exactly what happened in Haiti. What buildings are damaged, where facilities are, that kind of basic crowd-sourcing already happens.

"But we want to augment that with autonomous flying vehicles that are able to get a view of the bigger picture on the ground, to improve situational awareness. They can figure out where the disaster responders should go, where the resources should go."

In Professor Jennings' proposed system, UAVs will be launched immediately to monitor the unfolding disaster from the air. According to the BBC, what makes Prof Jennings's research stand out is that he is interested in allowing drones to fly as squadrons, improvising their own flight paths as a unit in response to new information, without human intervention.

"The underlying research is based on aspects of artificial intelligence, getting software to do clever things, and underpinning that is a form of mathematics", explains Professor Jennings.

The teams of drones that will patrol a disaster have already been tested extensively in Sydney, Australia, and Professor Jennings tells the BBC that a fully operational system will be ready in about 18 months.

BBC Technology: Disaster drones: How robot teams can help in a crisis

Researchers at ECS-Electronics and Computer Science have devised a novel method for forming virtual power plants to provide renewable energy production in the UK.

The results of their work, which presents a new mechanism for integrating small renewable sources into the Grid, are currently being presented to the prestigious AAAI Conference being held this week in Toronto.

In the last decade, small and distributed energy resources (DERs), such as wind farms and solar panels, have begun to appear in greater numbers in the electricity supply network (Grid). To ensure that energy demand is met without interruptions, the Grid requires power suppliers to provide an estimate of their production and the confidence in meeting that estimate. Depending on the confidence placed on the estimates, the Grid is able to choose the appropriate number of conventional generators needed to produce and supply energy whenever it is needed - the more accurate the provided estimates, and the higher the confidence placed in those estimates, the better for the Grid scheduling activities. Although the deployment of DERs could reduce reliance on conventional power plants, their integration into the Grid is problematic, since the DERs, given their small size, are largely ‘invisible’ to the Grid. Even if visible, the uncertainty and uncontrollability of renewable energy sources prevents individual DERs from profitably dealing with the Grid directly, or participating in the wholesale electricity market because they are often unable to meet the set generation targets.

Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) are fast emerging as a suitable means of integrating DERs into the Grid. They are formed via the aggregation of a large number of such DERs, enabling them to reach similar size and supply reliability as conventional power plants. In a new study, ECS researchers promote the formation of such ‘cooperative’ VPPs (CVPPs) using intelligent and multi-agent software systems. In particular, they designed a payment mechanism that encourages DERs to join CVPPs with large overall production. Dr Valentin Robu, from the ECS Agents, Interaction and Complexity Research Group, who worked on the study, says: “There is considerable talk about how to integrate a large number of small, renewable sources into the grid in a more efficient and cost- effective way, as current feed-in tariffs, that simply reward production, are expensive and ineffective. “CVPPs that together have a higher total production and, crucially, can average out prediction errors is a promising solution, which does not require expensive additional infrastructure, just intelligent incentives.” By using a mathematical technique called proper scoring rules - a measure of the performance of an entity, be it person or machine, which repeatedly makes decisions under uncertainty) - intelligent software agents, representing the individual DERs, are incentivised to report accurate estimates of their electricity production. The researchers devised a scoring rules-based payment mechanism that incentivises the provision of accurate predictions from the CVPPs - and in turn, the member DERs - which aids in the planning of the supply schedule at the Grid. The mechanism guarantees that DERs are rewarded for providing estimates that are both accurate and have a high confidence, ensuring that software agents are given credit for high probability estimates that are close to the realised ones. Dr Robu adds: “Scoring rules with specific incentive properties have long been used to design payment mechanisms that incentivise agents to report private probabilistic predictions truthfully and to the best of their forecasting abilities. “We show that our mechanism incentivises real DERs to form CVPPs, and outperforms the current state of the art payment mechanism developed for this problem.” The researchers collected half-hourly wind-speed data for a 10-week period from 16 commercial wind farms in the UK in order to validate their approach. They will be presenting their paper at the AAAI conference (22-26 July), in Toronto, Canada this week. The Southampton researchers have been exploring these ideas for some time through the iDEaS project, an industrially-funded project, which aims to explore the issues associated with the decentralised control, operation and management of future generation electricity networks. The other members of the research team are Dr Ramachandra Kota and Dr Georgios Chalkiadakis. The project is led by Dr Alex Rogers and Professor Nick Jennings.