Motivation

Mitigating climate change and, as a result, the energy transition is one of the greatest technological and social challenges of our time. The main challenge for a reliable, economically and ecologically justifiable energy supply lies in the efficient, secure and reliable digitalisation of a technical system for integrating a large number of producers, consumers, storage systems and grid components that are difficult to forecast and feed in fluctuating energy into a technically stable and financially viable overall system. The energy system is also one of the critical infrastructures. These are the lifelines of modern societies, the failure or impairment of which would result in prolonged supply bottlenecks, significant disruptions to public safety or other dramatic consequences.

A specialisation in energy informatics enables graduates to work in a wide range of professional fields in the energy industry. They acquire skills in the field of digitalisation and the systems theory and information technology analysis of energy technology systems, from modelling, control and status monitoring of individual components to the planning and implementation of new methods for the safe operational management of complex energy distribution grids and innovative possibilities for sector coupling. To this end, they not only apply state-of-the-art methods, but also innovative approaches to analysing and solving problems that enable Computing Science to be interlinked with other disciplines.

Starting with the operation of generation plants (e.g. power plant and wind farm operators), through the operation of plants, grids and infrastructures (e.g. grid operators, communication service providers), energy services (e.g. portfolio management, electromobility, energy forecasting) to consulting and sales. Or they conduct research at research institutions or universities on missing building blocks for the successful digitalisation of the energy supply and thus the successful implementation of the energy transition. We support you in transferring your knowledge to regional and national research institutions and industry. Graduates of this specialisation also have the opportunity to work on innovative research and development projects not only in universities and industry, but also in non-university research institutions such as OFFIS e.V. - Institute for Computing Science or the DLR Institute of Networked Energy Systems.

Programme requirements

Compulsory

• Inf5107 Digitalised Energy System Requirements Engineering
• Inf5106 Digitalised Energy System Modeling and Control
• At least one from
  • Inf516 Distributed Operation in Digitalised Energy Systems
  • Inf5110 Digitalised Energy System Co-Simulation
  • Inf515 Intelligent Energy Systems
  • Inf514 Simulation-based Smart Grid Engineering and Assessment

Choice

• Inf5100 Digital Technology on Energy Markets
• Inf5102 Fundamentals of Game Theory in Energy Systems
• Inf5103 Optimal and Model-Predictive Control
• Inf584/ Inf585 Special Topics in Energy Informatics I/ II
• Inf581 Special Topics in Digitalised Energy Systems
• Inf5113 Digitalised Energy System Cyber-Resilience
• Inf5114 AI in Energy Systems
• Inf5115 Socio-technical Energy Systems
• Inf586/ Inf587 Current Topics in Energy Informatics I/ II
• Inf591 Current Topics in Digitalised Energy Systems
• Inf100 Human-Machine Interaction
• Inf105 Fault Tolerance in Distributed Systems
• Inf651 Operational Environmental Information Systems
• Inf300 Hybrid Systems
• Inf303 Fuzzy Control and Artificial Neural Networks in Robotics and Automation

Choice of subjects outside Computing Science (NI choice)

• Wir270 Resource and Energy Economics
• Wir915 Renewable Energy Systems
• We812 Environmental Law
• We901 Environmental Economics
• Wir360 Environmental and Sustainability Policy
• Mat996 Introduction to Numerics
• Mat997 Introduction to Stochastics

The project group and the final thesis must be thematically related to the specialisation. (The academic advisors for the specialisation will confirm whether this is the case for your chosen topic).

Contact persons

Prof. Dr Sebastian Lehnhoff (Certificate)

Prof. Dr Andreas Rauh

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Astrid Nieße

Prof. Dr Philipp Staudt

Contact person for OFFIS-Transfer:

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Astrid Nieße

Contact person for DLR transfer:

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Andreas Rauh

Contact person for industry contacts:

Prof. Dr Sebastian Lehnhoff