A standard-compliant and semantic-based communication architecture for smart grids

Nowadays, the smart grid is a very important topic within the energy domain. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines the smart grid as the modernization process from the current power grid to the power grid of the future. Whereas monitoring, protection and automatic optimization play key roles along the whole energy value chain (central and distributed generation , transmission and distribution networks, industrial users, energy storage installations, electric vehicles, households, etc.) [NIS2010]. Various national and international studies point out that a new-style Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) infrastructure is needed to realize the vision of smart grids. Furthermore, they identify a lot of ICT challenges (e.g. novel services, products and markets) and emphasize the importance of standardization in terms of integration and interoperability [RUB2010]. Within the overall context of smart grids in the energy domain this research project addresses the problem of service application. Smart grids already contain a lot of functionalities and new as well as novel ones will arise in the future. But due to missing common semantics it is not possible to find desired services in an appropriate way. This is a problem because smart grids contain of many different stakeholders. The stakeholders play various roles and have their own views on smart grids. In many cases this leads to different understandings of the same things. Furthermore, various requirements in terms of interoperability have to be considered to facilitate dynamic integrations into the complex system. Solving these problems means to increase the overall system performance and efficiency and to decrease the operating and integration costs. The use of standards is an established means to meet interoperability requirements. Meta-data annotation enables the application of semantic web services which support automatic processes and use a common semantic basis. Standardization in terms of ICT is a very important topic for smart grids and also Semantic Technologies become more and more important [USS2008]. But the combination of those standards chosen for this approach and the selected semantic web service technologies is a novel way to address the problem of a missing semantic basis for the automation and IT layer. The main critical success factors for the proposed solution will be the implementation costs related to the overall costs of the device which should be controlled, the definition of novel smart grid system services and the mediation between different ontologies which provide the common semantic basis. Therefore, thorough …