Why (and What) to Steal to Speed the Smart Grid

It is exciting to see the progress of the Smart Grid. That progress could be even faster if we would do more stealing. More specifically, if we take design principles from the new Internet-based, enterprise-level applications.

Several Smart Grid initiatives are underway to enable applications such as distribution automation, self-healing, sense and respond, automated market interaction, integration of distributed energy resources, advanced metering, and customer energy services. These initiatives include (but are not limited to) EPRI’s Intelligrid, DOE’s GridWise and NETL’s Modern Grid.

These architectures will be very significant in promoting standards, guidelines, and interoperability frameworks.  In general, they attempt to unify existing standards. The typical approach is to obtain agreement on the information models so services can be orchestrated to automate business processes.

Although such agreements are critical to the grid of the future, they require significant overhead to maintain compatibility between shared information models.  As well, the traditional approach to automating business processes is highly prescriptive, which can create complexity when conditions change.

But what if applications could negotiate amongst themselves, without human intervention? And what if they could adapt to changes as they occur? Those abilities can be ours if we borrow next-generation design principles from the Internet.

Next-Generation Design Principles

The Internet represents a global, distributed, open, heterogeneous, decentralized environment – just like the Smart Grid. That is why the grid will benefit from the design principles emerging from the use of the Internet for next-generation information services. Those principles arise from the convergence of several technologies, including the Semantic Web, Service-Oriented Computing, and Multi-Agent Systems.

·         The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web that permits machine-understandable data. It provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application and company boundaries. It integrates applications using URLs for naming and XML for syntax.

·         Service-Oriented Computing is a cross-disciplinary approach to distributed software. Services are autonomous, platform-independent computational elements that can be described, published, discovered, orchestrated and programmed using standard protocols. They can be combined into networks of collaborating applications within and across organizational boundaries.

·         Software agents are autonomous, problem-solving computational entities. They often interact and cooperate with other agents (both people and software) that may have conflicting aims. Such environments are known as Multi-Agent Systems.  They add the ability to coordinate complex business processes and adapt to changing conditions on the fly.

From the high-level perspective, the fundamental issue of interoperability should be our first target. Once solved in an intelligent, automated way, it will significantly lower the costs of implementing today’s Smart Grid applications and smooth the path for applications of the future.

Collectively, these next-generation technologies and design principles can enable many of the desired features of the Smart Grid. For these reasons and more, organizations architecting the Smart Grid should “steal” them as soon as possible. Who should we be robbing? The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the best place to start.

And not to take the fun out of it, but we won’t really be stealing. Organizations such as W3C freely share their findings. They recognize – as we should too – that easing and automating the interoperability issue creates a better, more prosperous future for all of us.

   W3C home page

   W3C Semantic Web start page

   Email David Cohen with comments or questions

David Cohen is the co-founder and CEO of Infotility. He has commercialized more than 10 energy-related software products, co-founded three startup companies and led numerous R&D joint ventures in the U.S., Europe, Latin America and Australia. He is a member of the GridWise Architecture Council (GWAC) and serves on the board of directors for Green Building Studio, Inc., and Aura Renewable Energy Corporation.