Barbara participates in the Iberdrola-led Consortium on Artificial Intelligence applied to Energy

The project, which started mid-2021 is part of the Missions program funded by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation within the IA4TES MIA 2021 project, aims to develop advanced Artificial Intelligence technology in the energy sector, both in renewable generation, networks and at the customer level.

Smart Grid

The call for "R&D Missions in Artificial Intelligence' awards funds to research projects submitted by consortia composed of large companies, academic institutions, small and medium-sized enterprises.

The consortium led by Iberdrola has the participation of nine startups including Barbara IoT and Ariadna, Balantia, Baobab, Program, Flexidao, Rated Power, Singlair and Stemy. It also collaborates with seven research centres and universities: Tecnalia, BCAM, Universidad Granada, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Universidad de Salamanca, Vicomtech, Instituto de Ingeniería del Conocimiento and Minsait.

With €12.5 million, the project highlights the need to increase investments in electricity grids above the levels of past decades in order to achieve the objectives of ensuring access to affordable, secure, sustainable and modern energy in Spain.

Research on grid digitisation will allow the development of increasingly bi-directional and flexible systems that allow the incorporation of generation points close to the places of consumption, such as self-consumption and electric vehicles, as well as greater robustness to guarantee the incorporation of more renewable energy sources into the grid.

Launch of the project held in Bilbao in November 2021.

Barbara the Cybersecure Industrial Edge platform

The Edge Computing Technology for Smart Grid developed by Barbara, will provide answers to the main challenges of the electricity sector.

Barbara´s Industrial Edge advantage is that is designed to deploy Artificial Intelligence at the Edge in a cyber-secure manner. It enables the deployment of Artificial Intelligence in the field, so that vendors and manufacturers can abstract from connectivity/communication, cybersecurity and infrastructure and focus on the execution and management of their algorithms.

More specifically, Barbara's Industrial Edge platform provides the infrastructure for:

1. Developing cyber-safe Artificial Intelligence on the Edge

2. Remote deployment and management of cyber-secure Edge Nodes.

3. Protect the Intellectual Property of deployed Artificial Intelligence.

4. Run dockerised algorithms from different authors on Edge nodes.

About Missions Programme

The Artificial Intelligence R&D Missions 2021 Programme is part of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation's Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan and is supported by Next Generation EU Funds.

This programme is aimed at large R&D projects carried out in cooperation, involving both public and private entities to address the country's major missions in different thematic areas. IA4TES is led by Iberdrola and involves nine startups and seven research agents and Minsait.

About Barbara

Barbara is the Cybersecure Industrial Edge Platform, designed to implement automated decision-making within critical industrial processes.  Barbara´s platform brings intelligence directly inside industrial installations and it orchestrates and executes Edge Apps at scale.

Its architecture, distributed in thousands of computing nodes, allows to communicate and virtualise any element and deploy Artificial Intelligence applications in real-time.

Developed with cybersecurity by design, and compatible with Edge applications to optimise industrial processes and asset management, it is the perfect enabler to address the industry’s biggest challenges and accelerate industrial intelligence.