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Editor's note: This is the final piece in a three-part smart enterprise series for Smart Grid News by GTM Research senior analyst Chet Geschickter, who authored The Smart Utility Enterprise 2011-2015: IT Systems Architecture, Cyber Security and Market Forecast.

 

By Chet Geschickter

 

Recently, a seasoned industry expert laughed when I asked about using service oriented architecture (SOA) to run smart grid applications.  He was skeptical that an enterprise service bus (or ESB – the messaging engine at the heart of an SOA environment) can scale to process the thousands of messages per second needed to monitor and control the grid.  There’s also the issue of emergency situations which can drive a spike in message volume as alerts and alarms come pouring in.  This spells big trouble for ESBs designed to handle back-office business processes, not real-time industrial control systems. 

 

As promising as SOA is for building composite smart grid applications, the architecture and supporting technology approach is not well-aligned with the needs of real-time industrial control systems like the operations technology (OT) used to control the grid.  Generally speaking, SOA is a loosely-coupled design pattern.  Common services can be listed in a service registry for reuse across the enterprise, however, time lags can occur during registry look ups, and the possibility exists that messages are delivered in a non-chronological order.  Direct communication links are more optimal grid control operations. 

 

This IT-OT gap may seem insurmountable.  However, there are two bridges for crossing the IT-OT divide: 1. Data and analytics, and 2. Federated (or heterogeneous) SOA. 

 

1.     We are already beginning to see IT and OT data move across domains as analysts move to improve business processes.  Examples include using voltage data from smart meters to support conservation voltage reduction; or using historical transformer failure data from a data historian as an input for condition-based preventative maintenance.  Enterprise information management is becoming a key discipline for making data a shared enterprise-wide resource, with new examples of collaboration between IT and OT appearing all the time. 

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2.     A federated SOA approach can be used to establish multiple enterprise service buses (ESB) and multiple service registries that can share a common gateway or coordinate through a master ESB.   Each ESB can operate its own “zone” but messages and data can pass between zones when necessary.  The specifics of the protocols and messaging approaches within each zone can be tailored to meet the needs of each.  For instance, a real-time operations zone could leverage ICCP, a real-time communications protocol, while the IT zone could use conventional TCP/IP.  Specific rules for communicating between zones can protect OT resources to ensure reliable grid operations, especially in special situations like emergency operations. 

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SOA/EA - Infrastructure Architecture

As noted in the article, Grid modernization is unique in the number & variety of complex discrete processes that must be coordinated with low latency, under high load. As functions continue to evolve, the impact of every change upon the operating environment can become unwieldy to manage. This implies the need for Service Orientation and Enterprise Architecture (EA) to illuminate how new requirements or loads interact with existing functions. Most of the articles comments concerning SOAs and ESBs are due to vendor, or design limits. * EA practices such as TOGAF, assist in the appropriate use of technology - eg: SOA governance including device &/or service discovery can be adjusted to match functional requirements. * Service Orientation & EA ensure not only transaction and system-level efficiencies are realized, but also cross-domain ramifications are understood. -Service orientation & EA provides from business concept to code, an atomic & traceable mechanism to view functional requirements and interactions. -They provide a manageable way understand how a change affects ancillary processes/services. * Federated ESB approaches is used by architects keep order in their conceptual design. Applying this technique without EA due diligence can lead to siloed architectures which are difficult to manage and modify as new cross-functional requirements occur. * Having architected and implemented many extremely high volume transactional systems, I can vouch that loosely-coupled architectures scale reliably under heavy loads, with extremely high SLAs (99.9999% uptime) & transaction integrity. These sorts of mission critical systems exist in defense, financial, telecommunications & healthcare systems. * Enterprise Information management is not transactional in nature, applying EA and SOA techniques with web semantics provides the mechanism to access information without knowing the underlying ICT technologies. To lower these barriers, NIST Smart Grid Architecture Committee (SGAC) defined a conceptual architecture to support Smart Grid requirements. SGAC identified the use cases, requirements, business and ICT services necessary. SGAC is identifying the semantic interchanges amongst the various interoperability standards and harmonizing the differences between them. The NIST SGC URL is: http://collaborate.nist.gov/twiki-sggrid/bin/view/SmartGrid/SmartGridArchitectureCommittee

Stephan Amsbary - 10/18/2011 - 12:40

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