Prototyping a Software Defined Utility

Abstract

Abstract:The smart grid can be seen as a hybrid system composed by many systems. From a large scale point of view, it combines the electric power system itself and a heterogeneous information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure. Additionally, these systems are composed by many building blocks that are designed and managed as separated systems which are hard to fully integrate between each other. Relying on the experiences arisen and the knowledge gathered from the partners during the development of the FP7 European projects INTEGRIS (intelligent electrical grid sensor communications) and FINESCE (future internet smart utility services), this paper presents the software defined utility (SDU) concept for the management of the smart grid and its security, which advocates for the migration of the utility infrastructure to software systems instead of relying on complex and rigid hardware based systems. Following this approach, SDU proposes the evolution of power systems' ICT and the usage of programmable commodity hardware, low-cost sensors, and reliable high-speed IP-based communications underneath. More concretely, this paper proposes some building blocks for the deployment of the SDU (flexible data management infrastructure, context-aware security and web of things interface) and evaluates their functionalities and benefits for the smart grids of the future.

A Smart Campus’ Digital Twin for Sustainable Comfort Monitoring

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Ontology-Defined Middleware for Internet of Things Architectures

“…The Smart City use case involving intelligent trash bins is related to the ENVISERA project. Finally, an analysis is performed over the use case explained in Section 4 which is related to the Smart Grid [17,27], it is referred to as the “Prosumers” use case.…”

Automatic fault location in electrical distribution networks with distributed generation

“…Several researches have worked on the analysis of different communications options for efficient and flexible deployment of novel Smart Grid services at the distribution level towards the Software-Defined Utility (SDU) concept [161], with the objective of obtaining a higher software-based and automated management of the grid and reducing its operational cost. As stated in [161], SDU strategies send messages with stringent reliability demands between different points of the electrical distribution network with delay requirements of a few [ms], which force the communication network to react in a similar response time in case of failure. Thus, many of the SDU services have stringent requirements in terms of availability and delay as it is mentioned in [161] and [162].…”

“…As stated in [161], SDU strategies send messages with stringent reliability demands between different points of the electrical distribution network with delay requirements of a few [ms], which force the communication network to react in a similar response time in case of failure. Thus, many of the SDU services have stringent requirements in terms of availability and delay as it is mentioned in [161] and [162]. For example, in the European project FINESCE, SDU claims are not always considering their extension to the power distribution network and thus they were confined to the primary substation.…”

“…Previous articles [161] and [162] have disclosed that intelligent electronic devices operating with the IEC 61850 protocol and that any other protocols for accessing data are translated to the mentioned protocol before storing the data in the repositories. The enablement of GOOSE messages defined in the IEC 61850 standard in the whole domain is also relevant, even outside of the Primary Substation.…”