Overview of the Course:

Connected device is disrupting many business, power utility being no exception. Power Utility companies are essentially faced with four challenges from growth of IoT

1. Machines, Controllers, HMI, SCADA systems are increasingly becoming cloud connected by the vendors who promise to offer more analytics and insight via their data for predictive and preventative maintenance. But quarantine policy of the critical assets means these new IoT features from the Machine/Controller Vendors can’t be utilized by the Power Companies .

2. With the ever decreasing cost of solar and wind power microgrid, Utility companies will soon see declining revenue from power generation. To compensate for the lost revenue of power production, the company has to aggressively pursue new areas of revenues such as Energy management of Home as a service, Energy storage as a service, offering grid service for EV charging, grid service for P2P energy trading between the homes, home and microgrid, microgrid to microgrid, microgrid to battery, home to battery etc. All of this need to be facilitated via smart metering, smart grid and smart & secured transactions only possible via DLT ( distributed ledger technology) like IOTA. Also Utilities are exploring to offer some of the smart city services to the city authority.

3. For critical infrastructure like dams, ICOLD ( International Committee Of Large Dams) want to see Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of the dams real time so that any impending danger of collapse of the dam or rock or tunnel can be informed in advance to vacate the people who may be affected .

4. Also a new emerging area of revenue will be EV charging in Parking-How IoT can facilitate smart charging and smart parking?

Over the last three years, engineering in IoT has seen massive changes primarily driven by Microsoft, Google and Amazon. These large behemoths have invested billions of dollars to develop IoT platforms that are more easy to manage and secure. Also IoT edge has gained a lot of momentum in both research and deployment as only means for practical IoT implementation. 5G is promising to transform the business of IoT. This has led to an unprecedented large swath of new areas of research funding in IoT. This is why right now for any practicing engineer it is absolutely essential to understand IoT platforms developed for major players like AWS, Google and Specially Microsoft.

However, neither of the above platform offers exhaustive or a totally comprehensive solution for a scalable IoT. Just for Smart Metering to be deployed to millions of homes, additional technology to secure the smart meter, radio networks, IoT management technology and many other additional secured services will be required. Strategy, Price and Security of any IoT deployment must be optimal and acceptable. Given so much of interdisciplinary knowledge, it is almost difficult for any company to deploy a team which can meet all the requirements.

This course is a modest attempt to educate the key decision makers, developers, security experts about what are the challenges, risks and practical way to deploy IoT for their next generation power utility business.

In addition, with scalable deployment, managing IoT services for thousands of sensors and connections are emerging as a separate engineering subject of research. This area , formally known as managed IoT services is experiencing rapid growth as challenges for scalable IoT are much bigger than building them. This includes security of over the top firmware/software update, managing calibration of the sensors and systems, auto-diagnosis of any connection issue, narrowing down on root cause of API failures, tracking the hardware and service health of the distributed system etc.

Course objectives:

Main objective of the course is to introduce emerging technological options, platforms and case studies of IoT implementation in Power Utility Companies - Smart Metering, Smart Car, SHM ( structural health monitoring), Power Quality Diagnosis and Smart Contracts. Basic introduction of all the elements of IoT-Mechanical, Electronics/sensor platform, Wireless and wireline protocols, Mobile to Electronics integration, Mobile to enterprise integration, Data-analytics and control plane applications.

1. Technology Stacks: Devices, Gateways, Edge, Edge Cloud, Public Cloud, IoT databases, Web & Mobile Applications for IoT, Centralized vs Decentralized IoT.

2. IoT ecosystem for Business, third party device management, risk management of entire IoT ecosystem.

3. M2M Wireless protocols for IoT- WiFi, SigFox,LORA, LPWAN, Zigbee/Zwave, Bluetooth, ANT+ : When and where to use which one.

4. Fundamentals of IoT Gateways- Risks, Management and Ecosystem

5. Mobile/Desktop/Web app - for registration, data acquisition and control –Available M2M data acquisition platform for IoT—AWS IoT, Azure IoT, Google IoT.

6. Security issues and solutions for IoT- Review of security of all the technology stacks.

7. Enterprise IoT platforms such as Microsoft Azure IoT suites, AWS IoT, Google IoT , Siemens MindSphere

8. Smart Metering, Open Smart Grid Protocols (OSGP), ANSI C 2.18 Protocols , NIST Standard for HAN ( Home Area Network), Home Plug Powerline Alliance , Security Standard for Smart Meter- IEC 62056

9. Distributed Ledge Technology ( DLT) such as Blockchain, HyperLedger and DAG ( Direct Acyclic Graph) for smart contract, P2P transactions, smart car charging

10. IoT for critical infrastructure like DAM, Transformer, Sub-station, High Tension Wire

Target Audience:

1. Decision makers/strategist/Policy makers.

2. Engineering Leaders, Lead developers, Security Experts.