The DAISY laboratory is dedicated to innovative research in the field of distributed automation systems, that is to those problems of control and automation of processes, plants and systems characterized by the interaction between more components, both in the industrial and civil fields. Typical applications fall into two main areas: production systems and energy management.
The first field of applications concerns the control, supervision and monitoring of the performance of numerically controlled machine tools, of highly automated production systems, of robotized assembly and packaging lines, identification and diagnosis of failures in production systems, automatic generation of control code. The second field of applications includes the control and prediction for medium to large size energy production systems, such as wind farms and photovoltaic plants, thermo-electric and hydroelectric plants, the control and optimization in smart grids and demande-response management, advanced energy management and control in residential, tertiary and industrial buildings, improvement of the energy efficiency and retrofitting of thermo-electrical plants. Typical activities in the lab are modeling and simulation, control and automation, identification and prediction, optimization and practical implementation with off-the-shelf instruments. From the beginning, the group is very active in the technology transfer to productive companies of the territory, as well as in national and European research projects.
The lab also gave rise to a successful startup, and some patents.