As one of the Universities in Germany awarded the status of “Excellence University”, RWTH Aachen University, established in 1870, is a leading technical university in Germany and Europe with over 40,000 students and more than 500 professors. RWTH joins the IoT-NGIN project with the E.ON Energy Research Centre, Institute for Automation of Complex Power Systems (ACS).

The E.ON Energy Research Centre, a public private partnership between E.ON SE and RWTH Aachen University funded in 2006, fosters innovative energy research with a strong link with industry in an interdisciplinary approach, with five institutes from four different faculties.

Within this research centre, the Institute for Automation of Complex Power Systems focuses on research for the automation, modernisation and restructuring of electrical energy distribution systems. This research area deals with solutions for monitoring, maintaining and developing complex power systems. Both the simulation of dynamic processes in complex network systems as well as development of a stable and secure communication infrastructure are areas of expertise of the scientists working at ACS. The Institute is developing the science and technology for the transition to the next generation energy grid based on network distributed control systems, agent-based control, distributed observer and measurements, complex system theory and control under uncertainty. During 2014 the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology approved the merge of ACS with the Chair for Operating Systems creating the first chair in the Faculty that operates both in the Energy area and the ICT area to better address the modern challenges given by Energy Systems.

RWTH will use its expertise in both the ICT and Energy area to contribute to the project activities concerning the development of the next generation IoT technology and secure edge cloud computing, the definition of data and architecture models along with the specifications for semantic interoperability, and the validation of concepts and components interaction using 5G. Moreover, RWTH will be largely involved in the preparation, development and validation of the Smart Energy living lab, for which it aims at developing a new generation of devices endowed with IoT functionalities and at implementing innovative data-driven algorithms to unlock the monitoring, power quality analysis and control of the electrical grid. Specifically, RWTH will lead IoT centric dynamic management of 5G resources, and secure edge cloud framework for IoT micro-services, and will participate in the enhancement of IoT MCM communications. Additionally, RWTH will provide significant knowledge in the requirements analysis and IoT meta-architecture design. Moreover, RWTH will contribute to the federated, privacy preserving part. RWTH will also contribute to the integration part, to the smart grid use case, and cross-living labs validation and 3^rd party support. Finally, RWTH, as institution where knowledge is naturally disclosed, will be also actively involved in the dissemination of the project results through the participation to workshops and meetings and the presentation of relevant results in international conferences and journals.