A new National Centres of Competence in Research
Today, the Federal Council and the Swiss National Science Foundation unveiled six new National Centres of Competence in Research (NCCR). The six include three NCCR in which ETH Zurich is involved. NCCR "Automation" looks at the methods of automation ant the heart of digitisation and is led by John Lygeros and Gabriela Hug.
The NCCR “Automaticl” deals with the basics of automation and digitisation. It is led by John Lygeros, professor at the Automatic Control Laboratory, and by Gabriela Hug, professor at the Power Systems Laboratory. Today, many machines, processes and networks in industry and society can be controlled automatically without human intervention.
In the future, automation will likely expand to fully or partly control cities (“smart cities”), power grids (“smart grids”) and industrial processes (“Industry 4.0”). The main emphasis of the NCCR “Automation” is “dependable and ubiquitous automation”. As automation continues to advance in industry and society, its success and acceptance will depend heavily on reliability. Accordingly, the NCCR examines not only new methods of intelligent automation, but also aspects of IT security and the secure interaction of human and machine.
The advanced methods and computational tools developed are then applied to urgent, socially important issues in energy management, next-generation mobility and advanced manufacturing processes. As part of the NCCR’s work, a fully automated and decentralised energy management system is being developed at the neighbourhood and community level, in cooperation with cities, municipalities and industry. At the heart of the project’s vision is the idea that knowledge and technology transfer can take place in parallel with research, rather than just at the end of the research process.
This is exemplified in the energy management use case; a company will be founded that will assist with deploying the project methods and subsequently exploiting the expertise developed during the process. The “Automation” network comprises 16 research groups from ETH Zurich, EPFL, the research institution Empa and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland.