On April 19, the 2024 Geneva International Exhibition of Inventions announced the evaluation results of offline exhibitors. The project “Edge Control Devices and Aggregation Platform for Urban-Level Virtual Power Plant” developed by Professor Chen Qixin’s team from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Applied Electronics (EEA), Tsinghua University won the highly anticipated “Prize of the Saudi Arabian Delegation”, the “Outstanding Invention Award” named after the conference, and the “Gold with Congratulations of the Jury” award.

The control terminal of this project includes various edge computing functions such as intelligent computation of resource-level regulation feasibility, user-level energy management, and carbon management, while supporting multiple heterogeneous communication access protocols. The cloud aggregation platform can achieve functions such as real-time panoramic monitoring of massive resources, user invitations, resource aggregation, and instruction decomposition, providing important support for data analysis, reliable communication, and precise control of virtual power plants. This fully integrated system has been successfully applied in multiple provinces and cities such as Guangdong, Zhejiang, Hebei, and Shanxi. The invention not only received high praise from the jury but also attracted inquiries and cooperation from users in Europe, the Middle East, and other regions, promoting the international industrialization process of related inventions.

The Geneva International Exhibition of Inventions was founded in 1973 and is held annually (not held in 2020 due to the pandemic). As of 2024, it has successfully held 49 exhibitions and 2 special online exhibitions. This large-scale international exhibition is jointly organized by the Swiss Federal Government, the Geneva State Government, the Geneva City Government, and the World Intellectual Property Organization. It is also one of the longest-running and largest-scale invention exhibitions in the world. The exhibition evaluation is conducted face-to-face by professional judges selected by the organizing committee from various European countries, and awards are divided into gold, silver, and bronze.

The participating projects in this exhibition include more than 1,000 projects from over 50 countries including Germany, France, the United States, Canada, and China, making it the largest in history. The exhibition team from Tsinghua University won three awards named after the conference, ranking first in the number of awards at this exhibition.