SE4SG13

May 18th, 2013, San Francisco, USA

Workshop in conjunction with ICSE 2013

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Workshop Goals

The emerging smart grid is incorporating intelligence into power distribution networks. A smart grid provides the capabilities to handle the challenges of increasing complexity in the bulk power grid, to respond to demand growth, support renewable energy sources and satisfy the requirements for enhanced, adaptive service quality. Achieving these goals requires a framework for the cohesive integration of communication and information technologies, interconnected in a complex energy and information real-time control network. This framework must provide the principle properties of smart grids, including self-healing, availability and responsiveness to demand and supply variability. The smart grid poses new challenges for security and privacy because of the increased possibilities for information exchange.

The realization of smart grid benefits requires a major sustained effort from the power and software industry. This effort must deliver advanced software solutions, such as advance metering infrastructures that operate in real-time for the purposes of metering, communication, monitoring and control. Collectively, these emerging solutions pose a broad range of software engineering (SE) challenges, creating the need for members of the SE research community to interact with the power engineering community and other communities to address these issues. This workshop will facilitate this collaboration by bringing together members of these communities. They will be able to share perspectives and present findings from research and practice relevant to smart grid software and services. The goal of the workshop is to facilitate the maturing of software engineering methods and tools for smart grids and foster the communication between the different communities. Building upon the results from last year’s first edition of the workshop, one aim is to broaden the target audience and attract even more researchers and practitioners to form a targeted and cohesive community.

Call for Papers

This 2nd workshop will focus on understanding and identifying the unique challenges and opportunities for SE to contribute to and enhance the design and development of the smart grid. In smart grids, the geographical scale, requirements on real-time performance and reliability, and diversity of application functionality all combine to produce a unique, highly demanding problem domain for SE to address. The objective of this workshop is to bring together members of the SE community and the power engineering community to understand these requirements and determine the most appropriate SE tools, methods and techniques.

Topics of Interest

SE4SG workshop is interested in submissions on all topics related to identifying and developing appropriate methods, tools and techniques for smart grid software. Specifically, we will focus on:

• Applications that support power engineering operations. Such applications include, but are not limited to, complex event processing systems for managing and manipulating large amounts of real-time sensor data, and systems that provide infrastructure for metering, analysis, decision support and control applications;
• Software and enterprise architectures tailored for smart grids, including the challenges of the Smart Grid as an ultra-large-scale system;

• Designing applications with advanced computing capabilities. This requires understanding the implications of, for example, exploiting cloud computing and high performance, multicore computing platforms for computationally intensive smart grid functions;
• Designing simulation frameworks targeting smart grids. These can model designs and predict system properties, e.g., responsiveness and availability, based on simulated and historical data;
• Designing highly effective and usable analysis and monitoring tools for grid operation;
• Methodologies that apply advanced SE approaches to analyze and improve the properties of smart grid applications. These include model-driven development, self-managing and adaptive software systems, and quality reasoning and evaluation frameworks;
• Standards-based distributed architecture solutions and reference architectures that enable open interfaces with plug-and-play hardware and software components;
• The design and analysis of robust, scalable security and privacy frameworks for the smart grid;
• Approaches to modeling and monitoring the system-wide performance, scalability and/or other quality properties of the smart grid software framework;
• Software tools and engineering approaches for smart grid markets;
• Software engineering approaches for business-IT alignment for smart grids.

Important Dates

• Paper submission : Feb 14, 2013 (extended)
• Acceptance notification : Mar 02, 2013
• Camera ready copy : Mar 7, 2013
• Advance registration : TBA
• Workshop : Saturday May 18, 2013

Paper Submission Details

All papers should be submitted through Easychair: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=se4sg13

• Research papers will be thoroughly reviewed for novelty, technical quality, scientific soundness and relevance. They should not exceed 8 pages double column including figures and tables.
• Experience report papers cover innovative implementations, novel applications of smart grid related technologies, interesting results and experience in applying recent SE research advances to industrial situations on any of the topics of interest. Papers should be 6-8 pages double column including figures and tables.
• Vision papers present emerging research challenges and long-term research directions on hot topics of interest relevant to the smart grid domain. Submissions of papers should be 4 pages.

Paper Formatting Instructions

All papers must conform, at time of submission, to the ICSE 2013 paper formatting guidelines.  Make sure that you use US letter page format (don't use A4!). Submissions must be in PDF format. Author names and affiliations shall not be suppressed on the title page of the paper.