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About the project

The smart energy ecosystem constitutes the next technological leap of the conventional electrical grid. However, despite the fact that it brings beneficial environmental, economic and social changes, it also generates significant security and privacy challenges. The SDN-microSENSE project intends to provide a set of secure, privacy-enabled and resilient to cyber-attacks tools, thus ensuring the normal  peration of EPES as well as the  integrity and the confidentiality of communications. Learn more about the project in the next sections

The challenge

  1. Increase the EPES resilience in addressing cyber threats and attacks.
  2. Protect and advance the current SCADA, ICS infraestructure and all the interconnected systems from power outages, brownouts and blackouts
  3. Apply collaborative risk assessment and management in a large-scale level.
  4. Develop innovative solutions for enhancing the EPES resilience in the power level such as self-healing andislanding.
  5. Setting up common security principles and requirements in the physical level of the energy domain.
  6. Demonstrate the provided solutions in large-scale environments by involving all energy-related stakeholders.
  7. Foresee standardisation activities in all layers of the EPES ecosystem based on best practices and lessons learnt.

Project Objectives

  1. To design and provide a new resilient, multi-layered and SDN-enabled microgrid architecture.
  2. To design and develop a risk assessment and management framework.
  3. To develop and implement applications which exploit direct networking controllability and programmability offered by SDN.
  4. Deliver an energy trading platform for secure and flexible trading management.
  5. To provide a robust, distributed and effective IT cyber-defence system for large-scale EPES ecosystem.
  6. To design and deploy an anonymous channel of EPES.
  7. To deliver a privacy-preserving framework for enhancing EPES against data breaches.
  8. To design and develop and a policy recommendation framework based on the SDN-microSENSE results, lessons learnt and best practices for formulating recommendations for standardisation and certification.
  9. To design and demonstrate five large-scale pilots across Europe, including well-developed and developing countries in the energy efficient systems.
  10. To design an innovative business model and conduct a cost-benefit techno-economic analysis to strengthen the role of European energy and cyber-security industry in the global market.

Concept and approach

SDN-MicroSENSE will adopt an SDN architecture providing central control and global visibility capabilities. Based on this SDN architecture, SDN-MicroSENSE  will promote a security management and risk assemsment framework(S-RAF). Moreover SDN-MicroSENSE will implement a fully functional software framework wich will be capable of detecting and preventing cybersecurity attacks as well as unidentified threats in real time(XL-EDPS).At the same time, it will provide an anonymous security channel that will enable information sharing. Furtheremore a self-healing framework SDN-SELF will provide necessary response processes to cyber-attacks that will be activated in the case of emergency.

Target end users

The main targeted end-users of SDN-microSENSE include TSO, DSO, electricity generators, energy utilities, energy equipment manufacturers, aggregators, energy retailers, and in  eneral energy-related technology providers.

Main project events

The SDN-microSENSE partners will participate/organize workshops co-located with major conferences, on-site demonstrations, summer schools and free-access open events. In addition, the consortium will also collaborate as much as possible with other ongoing projects to exploit opportunities. 

EU Policies

In order to protect users privacy, SDN-microSENSE will provide particular certification guidelines that will meet all requirements stipulated in the GDPR. The guidelines will be based on the project results and lessons learned, thus all the required measures in order to enforce rights that are stated in the GDPR will be met. Moreover, in the context of SDN-microSENSE, specific SCADA & ICS Standardisation Activities will be proposed in order to relevant technical gaps.