Brandon J. Carpenter

VOLTTRON™: An agent platform for integrating electric vehicles and Smart Grid

The VOLTTRON™ platform provides a secure environment for the deployment of intelligent applications in the Smart Grid. The platforms design is based on the needs of control applications running on small form factor devices, namely security and resource guarantees. Services such as resource discovery, secure agent mobility, and interacting with smart and legacy devices are provided by the platform to ease the development of control applications and accelerate their deployment. VOLTTRON has been demonstrated in several different domains that influenced and enhanced its capabilities. This paper will discuss the features of VOLTTRON and highlight its usage to coordinate electric vehicle charging with home energy usage.

An Intelligent Sensor Framework for the Power Grid

The number of sensors connected to the electric power system is expected to grow by several orders of magnitude by 2020. However, the information networks which will transmit and analyze the resulting data are ill-equipped to handle the resulting volume with reliable real-time delivery. Without the ability to manage and use this data, deploying sensors such as phasor measurement units in the transmission system and smart meters in the distribution system will not result in the desired improvements in the power grid. The ability to exploit the massive data being generated by new sensors would allow for more efficient flow of power and increased survivability of the grid. Additionally, the power systems of today are not capable of managing two-way power flow to accommodate distributed generation capabilities due to concerns about system stability and lack of system flexibility. The research that we are performing creates a framework to add “intelligence” to the sensors and actuators being used today in the electric power system. Sensors that use our framework will be capable of sharing information through the various layers of the electric power system to enable two-way information flow to help facilitate integration of distributed resources. Several techniques are considered including use of peer-to-peer communication as well as distributed agents. Specifically, we will have software agents operating on systems with differing levels of computing power. The agents will cooperate to bring computation closer to the data. The types of computation considered are control decisions, data analysis, and demand/response. When paired with distributed autonomous controllers, the sensors form the basis of an information system that supports deployment of both micro-grids and islanding. Our efforts in the area of developing the next generation information infrastructure for sensors in the power grid form the basis of a broader strategy that enables better integration of distributed generation, distribution automation systems and decentralized control (micro-grids).Copyright

Transaction-based building controls framework, Volume 2: Platform descriptive model and requirements

Transaction-based Building Controls (TBC) offer a control systems platform that provides an agent execution environment that meets the growing requirements for security, resource utilization, and reliability. This report outlines the requirements for a platform to meet these needs and describes an illustrative/exemplary implementation.

VOLTTRON: User Guide

This document is a user guide for the deployment of the Transactional Network platform and agent/application development within the VOLTTRON. The intent of this user guide is to provide a description of the functionality of the Transactional Network Platform. This document describes how to deploy the platform, including installation, use, guidance, and limitations. It also describes how additional features can be added to enhance its current functionality.

VOLTTRON 3.0: User Guide

This document is a user guide for the deployment of the transactional network platform and agent/application development within VOLTTRON. The intent of this user guide is to provide a description of the functionality of the transactional network platform. This document describes how to deploy the platform, including installation, use, guidance, and limitations. It also describes how additional features can be added to enhance its current functionality.

OpenEIS. Users Guide

This document is a users guide for OpenEIS, a software code designed to provide standard methods for authoring, sharing, testing, using and improving algorithms for operational building energy efficiency.

OpenEIS. Developer Guide

The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Building Technologies Office (BTO) is supporting the development of an open-source software tool for analyzing building energy and operational data: OpenEIS (open energy information system). This tool addresses the problems of both owners of building data and developers of tools to analyze this data. Building owners and managers have data but lack the tools to analyze it while tool developers lack data in a common format to ease development of reusable data analysis tools. This document is intended for developers of applications and explains the mechanisms for building analysis applications, accessing data, and displaying data using a visualization from the included library. A brief introduction to the visualizations can be used as a jumping off point for developers familiar with JavaScript to produce their own. Several example applications are included which can be used along with this document to implement algorithms for performing energy data analysis.

The transactional network platform: poster abstract

The Transactional Network Platform (TNP) provides an open source reference platform for achieving the benefits of Transactional Energy. It allows researchers to effectively and efficiently implement their building control applications against a common message information exchange schema without having to build the underlying infrastructure for communicating with devices and other applications. Applications built in this platform have been deployed and are being demonstrated on real building control systems and appliances.

VOLTTRON 2.0: User Guide

This document is a user guide for the deployment of the transactional network platform and agent/application development within VOLTTRON. The intent of this user guide is to provide a description of the functionality of the transactional network platform. This document describes how to deploy the platform, including installation, use, guidance, and limitations. It also describes how additional features can be added to enhance its current functionality.