Real time energy management in smart cities by Future Internet Mikhail SIMONOV a,b,1 , Marco MUSSETTA b,c , Andrea PIRISI b , Francesco GRIMACCIA b , Davide CAPUTO b and Riccardo E. ZICH b a ISMB, Via P.C. Boggio 61, 10138 Torino, Italy b Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento di Energia, Via La Masa 34, 20156 Milano, Italy c Politecnico di Torino, DELEN, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129, Torino, Italy simonov@ismb.it, {mikhail.simonov , marco.mussetta, andrea.pirisi, francesco.grimaccia, davide.caputo, riccardo.zich}@polimi.it Abstract. Human behavior, both individually and socially, is aimed at maximizing some objective functions, and this is directly reflected in energy dynamics. New issues are emerging now, such as the unpredictability of some renewable sources generation and the new technologies enabling real time energy optimized use in smart cities. Here the role of the Future Internet in the smart grids is addressed, in particular enlightening how the anticipatory knowledge of the future occurrences of the energy consumption dynamics may be effectively promptly exchanged between competing actors. Keywords. Future Internet, cooperative environments, smart cities, smart grids, real time energy management 1. Introduction Nowadays more than 50% of the overall population of the world lives in urban contexts, contexts that are involved in a “natural” evolution process towards “smart” cities. The growing of this percentage makes smart urban environments dense and complex spaces, in which the energy distribution component, known as smart power grid, day after day presents a growing need of a new distributed intelligence in order to effectively manage all the incoming issues. Furthermore, the reduction of the carbon footprint of the cities is a pressing issue, necessitating a sophisticated control and management of the energy use on both the supply and demand sides over all aspects of city life. Much of the current studies on smart cities focus on this aspect. Future Internet [1] in a smart urban environment appears to us as the most effective tool that can enable the infrastructure to manage, control, optimize, and improve these aspects at both the micro- and the macro- level. For example, the detection of some repetitive events happening locally in real life, might impact on more cooperating or competing entities, suggesting the accounting and propagation of such events because of the expected consequences maturing elsewhere. This work is exactly focused on how to model, measure, monitor, optimize and control complex interdependent event flows happening in power grids, representing a significant infrastructure characterizing smart 1 Corresponding Author. Towards the Future Internet G. Tselentis et al. (Eds.) IOS Press, 2010 © 2010 The authors and IOS Press. All rights reserved.