Challenges in the representation of digital applications in SGAM: Overview and solutions

Abstract

Digital applications foster innovation and spur new business models emergence in the power and energy sector, enabling further development towards smart grids. The ongoing integration of disruptive digital tools and smart grid solutions brings new complexities to the design of new smart grid applications. To cope with standardisation and interoperability concerns, the smart grid architecture model (SGAM) is the state of the art framework to design new applications in the ecosystem of smart grids. However, conceptual challenges related to the actors definition arise when mapping new digital applications to SGAM, among others such as artificial intelligence and digital twins.Thus, this paper explores the latter challenges and presents three potential solutions to facilitate the deployment of digital applications in SGAM. These solutions are (i) the integration of a new interoperability layer to cover digital applications and humans in the current SGAM design, (ii) the decoupling of the component layer in three layers regarding the typology of actors, and (iii) the integration of a new interoperability layer to better represent the digital actors in cyber-physical applications.