Seven Israeli companies and five universities in Israel have formed the ISG Consortium to develop unified communication and smart grid management networks for utilities. The Israeli Office of the Chief Scientist (OCS) through its Magnet program will offer financial support for the project.

The founding members of the consortium include ECI Telecom, Motorola Solutions Israel, CEVA,Yitran Communications, PowerCom, RUGGEDCOM, Control Applications, Ben-Gurion University, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Ariel University Center of Samaria, Holon Institute of Technology and Tel-Aviv University.

“By working with companies in this field, we are able to incorporate their practical experience and input into our research, and we can conversely provide them with the expertise to develop the necessary algorithms and models to address critical issues such as reliability, vulnerability, self-healing networks, monitoring and control, It's a win-win situation for this field,” said Danny Dolev of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in a statement.

The focus of the ISG consortium will be on the smart grid of the future, addressing all issues related to communications and monitor and control of transmission, distribution and generation of energy to and from the home network.

Research topics of the consortium will include: developing distributed architectures and topologies to allow scalability, survivability and resiliency of utilities' communications networks; forecasting models for consumption and Demand Response control mechanisms; developing technologies and protocols for real time prediction, monitoring and control of potential failures, automatic isolation and self-healing of communication and electricity networks.

Recently, Pike Research (News - Alert) announced that the smart grid managed services market will reach $4.3 billion by 2015 from $470 million in annual revenue in 2010 as utilities face new operational challenges. The smart grid managed services market already attracts vendors from several different industries, such as the IT sector, the communications product and services sector, and the manufacturing sector.

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