During his tenure at RWTH Aachen University, Antonello Monti established a unique and successful research group in the field of power system automation. Currently, his group involves about 50 scientists full time and is one of the most successful groups at the European level. According to the statistics of the Joint Research Center of the European Commission, RWTH Aachen has been the number one for funding in the area of Smart Grid within the Horizon 2020 program. Antonello Monti has been the most significant contributor to this success of the University. The main reason for this achievement is that he has developed a cross-disciplinary culture within his research group linking the domains of power systems, power electronics, and information technology.

Antonello Monti contributes to SAFEr Grid with his broad knowledge in the field of power system automation and control. Over the last decade, he has proposed innovative approaches to grid modeling in dynamic conditions that are the starting point of his work in SAFEr Grid. By bringing the power electronics and information technology knowledge into power systems, he has already been exploring the limits of classical theoretical approaches in power systems for several years. His contributions in the field of global stability of power-electronics-based systems are also expected to become the nucleus of the theoretical developments to support the foundation of store-and-forward as the fundamental principle of operation of low-inertia power systems. He has a track record in developing innovative architectures for system automation that are key for mapping the Internet principles to grid operation.

Antonello Monti has been the first European to receive the IEEE Field Medal Award for Innovation in Societal Infrastructure. In 2024, he also received the UNIPRENEURS award from the Minister of Education and Research in Germany to acknowledge his impact to start-up and technology transfer.

In the last three decades, Frede Blaabjerg has been pioneering research and innovation in the area of power electronics. He has become a major leader in this field, which today is used widely to create a modern sustainable society. His contributions therefore have had an impact at a very large scale. He has successfully bridged academic and industrial research from power engineering research to industrial solutions by initiating and directing many successful projects. The activities have raised those areas up to a higher technological level in order to meet the future challenges of the energy.

Frede Blaabjerg contributes to SAFEr Grid with his expertise in power electronics as well as their control and integration into the new asynchronous power grid architecture. He works on the hardware design of energy routers on the basis of smart transformers, active inductors and capacitors, and their operation with multiple control loops receiving aperiodic feedback. He also develops methods to assess the established power system in terms of small signal and large signal stability. To mitigate the risk of a failure in a SAFEr Grid subgrid, he further develops new methodologies from his theoretical contributions on key reliability metrics for energy dispatch. Furthermore, he supports system simulation and experiments (hardware in the loop tests) to demonstrate/validate the proposed methods in order to establish the vision of SAFEr Grid.

Frede Blaabjerg has done pioneering research and innovation in power electronics technology since the 1990s. In recognition of his outstanding contributions, he received the Global Energy Prize in 2019 and the IEEE Edison Medal in 2020.

During his tenure at RWTH Aachen, Frank Piller has established one of Germany’s largest research groups in technology and innovation management: the Institute for Technology and Innovation Management with currently more than 50 research positions. His research focuses on disruptive innovation in established industries and value creation strategies induced by new technologies and societal change. This includes studies on the emergence of data-driven business ecosystems, the strategic implications of Industry 4.0, and the societal acceptance of technological change.

Frank Piller contributes to SAFEr Grid with his academic research on the emergence of open innovation ecosystems and factors of successful (energy) system transformation. Beyond these scientific objectives, the project benefits from his broad experience in technology management (e.g., forecasting studies and life-cycle analyses), in creating supportive structures for stakeholder acceptance and user adoption, and in reaching broad audiences in society, industry, and politics. Over the past decade, he has developed and implemented a comprehensive research agenda on data-driven industrial ecosystems, some with a central orchestrator, others without (as in the case of SAFEr Grid). In other research, he has modeled the economic implications of the transition from traditional manufacturing setups to digital production models based on additive manufacturing (3D printing). In his research, he strives to combine academic rigor with practical relevance. While not a traditional energy economist, he has been involved in many projects in this sector, such as research on open energy innovation networks, digital twin strategies for utilities, user innovation for electric vehicles, or business model innovation around digital (smart) energy services. In addition, he can draw on his broad academic network to bring dedicated external expertise to the project. All this equips him extremely well to lead the research on the SAFEr Grid’s Application Layer.

Frank Piller investigates open, data-driven industrial ecosystems. His research in this field receives funding from the Cluster of Excellence “Internet of Production”. He chaired a VDI expert group for the development of standards in the field of digital business models. In 2017, he was elected (as the first management professor) to the Scientific Council of the Platform “Industrie 4.0”, the largest multi-stakeholder initiative of its kind in Germany. With his group, he continues to build a worldwide reputation in the field of open innovation and co-creation, by investigating the design of open innovation platforms, new models for knowledge transfer, or user innovation and customer co-design.

During the past ten years, Klaus Wehrle has been making significant and pioneering contributions to the field of communication systems, especially Internet architecture and the (Infrastructural/Industrial) Internet of Things, with a particular focus on distributed coordination and control, reliability and resilience, and security and privacy.

Klaus Wehrle contributes to SAFEr Grid with his expertise on Internet architecture and the Infrastructural Internet of Things. He specifies and analyzes the challenging communication infrastructure necessary to coordinate energy balancing and streaming in a store-and-forward architecture, along with the reliable and scalable coordination of producers, consumers, and grid-devices to enable new, innovative, and smart energy applications. To this end, Klaus Wehrle can build upon his experience in Internet architectures in general and, more specifically in decentralized coordination of distributed systems as well as the coordination of Cyber-Physical Systems. Of particular importance is his background in security and privacy research, which is essential for an asynchronous power system that is resilient against attacks and capable of keeping information private. Reliability, i.e., resilience against failures, is a different, but not less important aspect, which he has also been studying extensively for several years.

Klaus Wehrle and his team were the first to devise the symbolic analysis of networked and distributed systems, a method to discover most seldom bugs in highly critical systems. He devised new algorithms that successfully discovered extremely insidious errors hidden in code that is deployed on over 100 million systems worldwide—undiscovered for more than a decade. Moreover, Klaus Wehrle initiated and co-coordinated the DFG Priority Program “Cyber-Physical Networking”, a highly multi-disciplinary initiative that is developing system-wide concepts and theories for modeling, analysis, co-ordination, and optimization of the communication part of networked control systems and real-time sensitive applications, such as the future energy grid. This enables a unified view for power systems by models and methods coming from communication, distributed systems, as well as control and information theory.