Mathias Uslar

Survey of Smart Grid Standardization Studies and Recommendations

Currently, several smart grid efforts in US and Europe are gaining momentum. Even if there are different focuses in US and Europe on what is known as the smart grid, all agree on the fact, that standardization is a key issue. Hence, a lot of studies and roadmaps pick standardization in the context of smart grids out as a central theme. The various approaches are concentrating on different core areas, depending on the circumstances in which they were elaborated. However, no overview aligning these approaches exists. This contribution takes all relevant approaches up to now into account, which give concrete recommendations for smart grid standards. The approaches will be aligned, and a set of core standards will be identified to point out the most important fields for future research and development. Furthermore, the IEC TC 57 Seamless Integration Architecture SIA will be introduced and extended by future standards, which were identified as core standards and existing work not yet included in the SIA.

OPC UA and CIM: Semantics for the smart grid

In our approach, we model an ICT-architecture for the utility domain for both transmission and distribution grids according to the IEC standards 61968 and 61970. To achieve this, we use three basic components. The first component is the Common Information Model (CIM) which is standardized by the IEC 61970/61968 standards. The OPC UA (Unified Architecture) is the second basic component. The OPC UA is also part of an IEC standardization process, called IEC the 62541 family. The concept of semantic web services is the last component. Our proposed architecture combines those three components to build a standards-based smart grid architecture and provides an intelligent, service oriented system for the utility domain. In most smart grid use cases, users know what they are searching for (e.g. the services mentioned in the NIST Interoperability study) but they do not know the proper syntax or system providing services. Hence, the user or system should find the matching service using semantic functions for the search. Our concept uses next generation techniques to become a state-of-the-art interface concerning information exchange between Energy Management Systems (EMS), Distribution Management Systems (DMS) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.

Market-based self-organized provision of active power and ancillary services: An agent-based approach for Smart Distribution Grids

Transforming the existing power generation to renewable, distributed generation implicates an increase in complexity for the control of the overall system. We propose a distributed control method to launch products of self-organized coalitions of small active units in a power grid at markets for trading active power as well as ancillary services. Our concept combines the integration of grid restrictions into proactive scheduling of active power with provision of ancillary services, and additionally provides reactive scheduling of active power, e.g. in the case of ancillary service activation.

Requirements for Smart Grid ICT-architectures

The development of Smart Grids requires supplementary ICT-architectures in order to exploit the systems full potential. However, a green field approach is not applicable for developing these architectures. The existing power distribution and transmission infrastructure stipulates numerous requirements. Thus, the field of requirements engineering as a significant part of software engineering is of high importance for the development process. In this contribution requirements engineering is investigated in the context of Smart Grids. Different approaches are introduced and applied to software and architecture development in Smart Grids. Finally, a set of requirements and according use cases for developing a Smart Grid ICT-architecture is presented. They are derived using established methodologies and specifications that discussed in this contribution.

The KMDL Knowledge Management Approach: Integrating Knowledge Conversions and Business Process Modeling

This paper shows the KMDL Knowledge Management Approach which is based on the SECI and ba model by Nonaka and Takeuchi and the KMDL Knowledge modeling language. The approach illustrates the creation of knowledge with the focus on the knowledge conversions by Nonaka and Takeuchi. Furthermore, it emphasizes the quality of knowledge being embodied in persons and creates a personalization and socialization strategy which integrates business process modeling, skill management and the selection of knowledge management systems. The paper describes the theoretical foundations of the approach and practical effects which have been seen in the use of this approach.

Smart Grid Architecture Model use case management in a large European Smart Grid project

On European level the EU Mandate M/490 including the final reports of the respective working groups are gaining momentum in the community. Two of the mandates core results deal with architecture description and use case management. As a response to the mandate, among other deliverables, the Smart Grid Architecture Model (SGAM) has been developed to provide a framework for Smart Grid architectures. Additionally, use case templates as well as a comprehensive methodology for use case management have been specified. The focus of this contribution is to demonstrate how use case management and the SGAM, and thus recommended by the EU, can be applied together in practice to specific use cases provided by the DISCERN project. The very purpose of the SGAM application is to share information among projects that implement similar use cases based on different technical solutions. Finally, open issues and research gaps to be addressed in order to utilize the SGAM will be presented.

Towards a Model-Driven-Architecture Process for Smart Grid Projects

The complexity in electrical power systems is continuously increasing due to its advancing distribution. This affects the topology of the grid infrastructure as well as the IT-infrastructure, leading to various heterogeneous systems, data models, protocols, and interfaces. This in turn raises the need for appropriate processes and tools that facilitate the management of the systems architecture on different levels and from different stakeholders’ view points. In order to achieve this goal, a common understanding of architecture elements and means of classification shall be gained. The Smart Grid Architecture Model (SGAM) proposed in context of the European standardization mandate M/490 provides a promising basis for domainspecific architecture models. The idea of following a Model-Driven-Architecture (MDA)-approach to create such models, including requirements specification based on Smart Grid use cases, is detailed in this contribution. The SGAM-Toolbox is introduced as tool-support for the approach and its utility is demonstrated by two real-world case studies.

Ontology matching system for future energy smart grids

Future power systems (commonly referred to as Smart Grids) will be managed by numerous intelligent electronic devices. These devices will have to interoperate; that is, they will need to exchange data with each other in order to co-operate over complex control tasks. Interoperability will only be achieved when Smart Grid devices share common semantics on the data they exchange. Standardization bodies have created standard data models defining these common semantics, but a unified standard data model has not been created for all Smart Grids. Consequently, in order to achieve interoperability in this domain, it is mandatory to find semantic correspondences (alignments) between different standard data models. Creating equivalent ontologies from the standard data models facilitates this task, because ontologies provide powerful reasoning services that can be used for automating ontology aligning. The majority of ontology matchers proposed in the state of the art, however, are only able to find simple equivalences of terms, while most alignments in Smart Grids are complex correspondences involving more than two terms. This paper presents an innovative ontology matching system that finds complex correspondences by processing expert knowledge from external domain ontologies and by using novel matching methods. The tests carried out in this study were based on the main interoperability issue within Smart Grids: interactions between CIM and SCL data models. In such tests, the proposed system outperformed one of the best ontology matchers according to the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI).

Views on Service Oriented Architectures in the Context of Smart Grids

The transfer from the current power grid to the power grid of the future implicates major changes for all stakeholders participating in the smart grid. Hence, utilities have to face several novel problems in terms of service provision. In this contribution, we examine two complementary views in the overall context of smart grids. We argue for a combination of those two views, based on ontology mappings. We explain a generic top-down and EA-related view, focused on intra-enterprise communication as well as a very domain-specific, technical bottom-up view, focused on inter-enterprise communication. The top-down view supports architects in reorganizing and developing enterprise SOA, whereas the bottom-up view takes into account the CIM (IEC 61970/61968), OPC UA (IEC 62541) and semantic web services to cope with technical interoperability in an utility domain-specific SOA. The combination of those two views results in the capability for smart grid stakeholders to realize seamless information exchange among field and IT.

CIMbaT - automated generation of CIM-based OPC UA-address spaces

Realizations of so called smart grids imply numerous challenges for stakeholders within the energy domain. ICT plays more and more a key role as it provides methodologies and approaches fostering smart grid applications. One of the challenges addresses integrated communications among energy management systems, distribution management systems, power generation systems and SCADA systems. In this case, a key issue to be considered is interoperability in terms of both syntax and semantics. For both, using standardized components like interfaces, protocols and data models, is essential to cope with the increasing number of actors and systems. Standards covering these components are discussed in various roadmaps and studies making recommendations. The Common Information Model is one of the recommended core standards for the smart grid and provides amongst others, a comprehensive data model for the energy domain. Another recommended standard is the OPC Unified Architecture being an abstract standard for server-client-communications which could be used in domain-specific contexts. Thus, combining the CIM data model and the UA communication architecture leads to a highly interoperable infrastructure meeting syntactic and semantic requirements. In this contribution, a two-step-approach is introduced realizing such an architecture.