Age of Information

The MSCA PF TimeSmart project continues under additional ARIS funding through the NOO initiative, supporting the reintegration and further international engagement of Slovenian researchers. The work of NOO TimeSmart focuses on advancing the practical deployment, robustness, and scalability of the methods developed in the MSCA TimeSmart fellowship. The project strengthens cloud-enabled processing of timely information, integrates AoI-aware forecasting and intelligent energy management into operational frameworks, and evaluates their performance in larger, more diverse smart-grid settings. By deepening the role of the Age of Information in real-time decision-making and coordination across distributed energy assets, the project moves the TimeSmart concepts closer to real-world readiness.

TimeSmart project will investigate the applicability of the novel Age of Information metric in smart grid networks. While the metric has become a valuable tool for measuring the system’s performance, its practical value and impact in the real-time system are left unanswered. This project seeks to remedy that by applying the metric to a system in which the timing of collected data, currently measured through jitter or latency, profoundly impacts management and control. The AoI offers a new perspective on how the system should collect and process information, as such decisions are also based on the context of processed information(their semantic nature). In turn, the new approach can offer an innovative way of improving the efficiency of renewable electrical energy supply and electrical loads by taking advantage of the available edge infrastructure. This project aims to adopt the AoI metric in smart grid networks to improve the energy transmission efficiency, achievable through more timely collected information, to save energy.

The main goal of the TIMIN6 project is to design a new data collection method based on the Age of Information (AoI) metric in connection with aspects of sustainable resource management. AoI is a relatively new and not yet fully understood metric in the field of information science. Considering the AoI can significantly impact energy consumption in data collection, but many aspects and the actual applicability of the metric still need to be explored. While most research in this area focuses on finding more efficient ways to extract information from already collected data, the TIMIN6 project will focus on the question of how frequently devices should collect and transmit data to operate in a more sustainable manner. The goal of this approach is to reduce unnecessarily wasted energy in the billions of devices that will make up 6G networks, enabling a more sustainable future. The project is funded by Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS).