Welcome to the 7th DACH+ Conference on Energy Informatics

Dear reader

On behalf of the steering committee, the technical program committee, and the organization committee it is my great pleasure to present you this year’s papers of the 7th DACH+ Conference on Energy Informatics. The objective of the DACH+ conference series on Energy Informatics is to promote the research, development, and implementation of information and communication technologies in the energy domain and to foster the exchange between academia, industry, and service providers in the German-Austrian-Swiss region and its neighbouring countries (DACH+).

The DACH+ Energy Informatics conference series is a joint initiative of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, the Swiss Federal Office of Energy, and the Austrian Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology. This year’s edition of the conference is also supported by the German Informatics Society.

Europe has set ambitious targets for increasing energy efficiency, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and enlarging the share of renewable energy sources. This conference is focusing on solutions using digitalization at the intersection of computing and communication technologies with energy systems, which is at the core of Energy Informatics. Application areas that have been the focus of this year’s submissions are home energy management, network operations, increased flexibility of demand and supply as well as its optimisation, the interoperable design of systems assuring energy efficiency, system stability, and security of supply.

Sincere thanks go to all those involved in the organisation of the DACH+ Energy Informatics: First of all, I want to thank the authors for providing the high-quality content of this supplement, the steering committee for their thoughtful guidance, especially the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, which within the Smart Energy Showcases – Digital Agenda for the Energy Transition (SINTEG) programme provided us with the possibility to publish this year’s papers and posters within this Open Access journal. I want to thank the chairs and the members of the technical program committee as well as the additional reviewers for providing valuable feedback to the authors.

I explicitly like to draw your attention to the two contributions awarded as best papers: “Enhancing Power Quality in Electrical Distribution Systems Using a Smart Charging Architecture” by Ammar Alyousef, Dominik Danner, Friederich Kupzog and Hermann de Meer combines relevant technologies and mechanisms in a solid framework for real-time congestion management and voltage control in a highly innovative manner (Alyousef et al. 2018). The paper “Estimating the Savings Potential of Occupancy-based Heating Strategies” by Vincent Becker, Wilhelm Kleiminger, Vlad C. Coroama, Friedemann Mattern comes in second and presents an easily applicable approach for quickly identifying households with high potential for energy savings and convincing inhabitants to adopt an occupancy-based heating strategy (Becker et al. 2018).

I hope that you will enjoy this highly interesting supplement and that it will foster new perspectives to continue your research in this emerging field of Energy Informatics.

Sebastian Lehnhoff