Aleksey Kychkin on Internship in Austria

Aleksey Kychkin, Associate Professor of the HSE-Perm’s Department of IT in Business, talks about the outcomes of his three-month internship in Software Competence Center Hagenberg (Austria).

About the Hagenberg Center

My internship took place in Austria, in the Software Competence Center Hagenberg. It is located in a small town not far from Linz, the third largest city in Austria. Linz is home to the headquarters of several very serious research organizations. One of them, Johannes Kepler University, is a world-renowned university with a strong school of computer sciences. The University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria is also based there.

These two universities run a sub-organization called ‘Initiative’. This is a software-park – an innovation cluster, an analogue of Silicon Valley in the USA, where a large number of different IT companies are located. I had my internship in one of the largest companies in that cluster – the Software Competence Center. In fact, it is a research institute, where work on creating cutting-edge software and analytical products for various customers in the EU are carried out. The Center focuses on working with production and power systems, analysis of power and process data, artificial intelligence and machine learning, computer vision and information security.

 

The First Meeting with Center Representatives

The first meeting with a representative from the Hagenberg Center took place in April 2019 in Hannover, at the ‘MESSE – 2019’ exhibition dedicated to power generation and automation in industry. The Insyte Electronics company, a partner of HSE University, helps us to develop research areas connected with power resource management technologies and Smart home systems. Its representatives invited me to take part in the exhibition as a member of the Perm regional delegation, as I am a specialist in cyber-physical systems. At the exhibition we met various industrial institutes from Germany, France, Italy, Spain. We also discussed the possibility of my internship with the Austrian Hagenberg Center. It took me six months to get ready for the trip.

The Topic of the Internship

In the Hagenberg Center, research is performed in two key directions: data analysis and programme systems. Since I already possessed the competences on developing programme systems for the power generation industry, I focused on developing my skills in power data analysis. The main project I was working with was a project for creating the analytical platform Flex+ for power consumption flexibility management.

The essence of my research was the optimization of work of an aggregated group of power systems for residential buildings with alternative sources of energy and batteries. The results of power data processing together with prices for electric power are used in the demand management market for more profitable buying/selling of electricity or for reducing power consumption during those hours with a high price of electricity. In Austria and Germany this market opened up about 10 years ago while in Russia it started just recently, in April 2019. Participants in the Russian market can scarcely imagine how to carry out procedures for forecasting and power resource management, and which software and hardware systems are necessary to implement load relief. As a result, my internship was very timely and topical.

Prospects for Further Cooperation With the Center

To date, we have signed an agreement on cooperation with the Software Competence Center Hagenberg, in which we identified several lines for cooperation. Scientific cooperation has the top priority: academic exchanges, internships, preparation of joint publications and papers for participation in international conferences, forums, symposiums, and also participation in preparing applications for grants.

Aleksey Kychkin
Associate Professor

Next year we plan to organize internships for Master’s students in ‘Information Analytics in Enterprise Management’. It goes without saying that cultural exchange, getting international work experience, and finding new lines of research are also very important for us.