Vertical Information Integration for Cross Enterprise Business Processes in the Energy Domain

The continuing growth and decentralization of power networks creates immense interoperability and integration challenges for ICT systems performing control and coordination tasks. On the one hand, large amounts of data coming from low-level field and automation systems need to be interpreted, aggregated, and made available to the business information systems to inform local decisions within power generation companies and operators; on the other hand, this vertical integration needs to be complemented by and connected to a horizontal integration capability which links the internal information and process models of different players in the market in (soft) real time, to inform and enable cross-enterprise coordination and optimization. In this paper, we introduce an integration architecture that supports and combines vertical as well as horizontal integration, and methods to improve interoperability and increase automation of cross enterprise business processes in the energy domain. We support vertical integration by means of a novel decentral information aggregation and routing platform to manage large-scale data intensive systems. Horizontal integration is enabled by a peer-to-peer content (document) repository which is used to coordinate and integrate local processes in a cross-organizational fashion, thus allowing, e.g., reliable and timely provision of electricity outage reports and preparation of coordinated action plans. We evaluate important properties of these methods and report experimental results.