IntelliGrid Architecture

Introduction

The Integrated Energy and Communications Systems Architecture (IntelliGrid Architecture) project represents the initial steps on a journey toward a more capable, secure, and manageable energy provisioning and delivery system. The IntelliGrid Architecture project envisions a variety of plausible futures for electric and energy service operations ranging from advanced automation to dynamic consumer response. The project results propose the next steps in the process of bringing this vision to fruition. These steps include using more rigorous systems engineering practices, application of IntelliGrid Architecture principles, and implementing the project recommendations.

IntelliGrid Architecture builds upon existing information industry infrastructure and standards development work and proposes a series of pathways by which the industry can more effectively integrate advanced automation and consumer systems over the long term. It should be noted that developing an industry-level architecture is a process, not an end in itself. The IntelliGrid Architecture project represents only the initial steps in a longer journey toward more effective long term and intelligent use of advanced technology.

Historical Perspective

One can consider IntelliGrid Architecture to be the third wave of focused efforts endeavoring to define reusable architectural components for energy enterprise and industry-wide applications. The first two waves of industry efforts were the Integrated Utility Communications Project and the UCA® 2 Effort.

Integrated Utility Communications Project

The first effort was performed through the efforts of the Integrated Utility Communications Project, which initiated by EPRI® in 1986. Through these initial efforts, a cadre of utility domain experts was consulted and their views combined into the first incarnation: UCA (Utility Communications Architecture). What was most impressive about this effort was the top-down, requirements-driven analysis performed by objective professionals in pursuit of a common communications denominator in the utility industry.

UCA 2 Effort

EPRI furthered the effort in a series of tailored collaborations that endeavored to apply the original UCA architecture. As UCA implementations efforts moved forward, improvements and clarifications were made to the document, which resulted in the issuance of enhanced architectural descriptions that became know as UCA 2.0.  Crucial to the success of UCA was the involvement of domain experts and developers in the application of the concepts. At this time, EPRI took steps to submit the UCA documents to the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Technical Committee 57, where the work was accepted into the IEC 61850 standards process.

These original EPRI efforts succeeded in establishing a direction for the industry and creating momentum toward abstract modeling and interoperability. The IEC 61850 standards are beginning to mature and major vendors are developing products from these standards. In addition, EPRI has worked to develop the Control Center API project into the Common Information Model through contributions to the IEC TC57 standards initiatives. Finally, EPRI has facilitated the formation of a users and vendors association, The UCA International Users Group[1].

More than a dozen years have elapsed since the first UCA effort. During this period two things have become apparent. First, an extraordinary evolution in communications and computing technology has occurred and will continue. Second, the scale and scope of advanced automation extends beyond the standards that have developed for the energy industry. Standards and infrastructure development from a variety of industries must now be included in the design and enhancement of an industry-level architecture for the energy industry. The energy industry architecture must now include standards from information technology, building and home automation, and eCommerce, to name just a few. It is important to now advance the concepts originally conceived and laid down by the UCA into the modern age. The IntelliGrid Architecture project represents this effort.

Industry Trends and Project Drivers

The IntelliGrid Architecture project was initiated in response to several significant trends and drivers facing the energy services and power delivery industries. Of these trends, five main technical development and business drivers were key forces behind the conception of the IntelliGrid Project. Each key driver, discussed individually below, carries important business and technical implications for the energy services industry as it moves ahead in the areas of advanced automation systems and consumer communications.

Driver 1: Cost effective use of emerging technology

The migration toward effective use of more capable open standards is crucial for a robust power marketplace where hundreds of companies supply products that enable future visions to become a reality. As such, the need for greater, and more effective, use of advanced communications and computing technologies is a key driver in the goal to improve the overall energy system.

The industry, as a whole, must strive to leverage investment in communications and advanced automation by more effectively using installed information automation equipment. Incremental investments in advanced automation and communication infrastructure must support multiple applications today and be extensible for future needs. The industry cannot afford to install single-purpose automation applications and equipment; this inevitably leads to layered, redundant infrastructures.

Designing the IntelliGrid Architecture to address this first driver will help overcome the limitations of proprietary systems and standards that are too narrowly defined. Large collections of disparate systems, sometimes with partially overlapping functionality, can quickly become confusing and unwieldy to manage. By comparison, a well-designed architecture enables initial designs and installations that take into account for future operating scenarios. Developing a cohesive architecture and intelligently using open systems will also assist in more effective life-cycle management of equipment. An overall architecture will help ensure that systems are initially built with a robust set of initial requirements so they are adequately specified and designed for both present and future needs. Architected systems will enable future integration and extensibility so that adding a new function does not require wholesale upgrades or replacement of systems.

Driver 2: Higher levels of integration across traditional boundaries

The need to better integrate advanced systems across traditional boundaries and barriers to create interoperable systems is the second key driver for the IntelliGrid Project. Industry changes are driving tighter operational integration between a greater diversity of business entities - for example, integrating electric energy generation and delivery with consumer premises equipment. In response to this demand, the industry is attempting to dynamically integrate consumer operations through a collection of applications, under the phrase ‘demand response’. A myriad of technical and management issues must be addressed, however, to enable this vision to reach maturity.

Unfortunately, this emerging paradigm will require a massive level of interoperability previously unseen in the power industry. Connecting end consumers to power system operations will call for the integration of millions, or even billions, of devices. Furthermore, administration of such a system presents a huge burden for entities using the equipment.

Development of an industry architecture will result in migration to more uniform systems development, thus easing the burden on systems administrators. More powerful systems administration capabilities (including data management, security, monitoring, and diagnostics) can be designed and built directly into equipment, enabling systems management that can scale to the levels now envisioned for the energy industry.

Driver 3: Infrastructure development and standards coordination

The third IntelliGrid Architecture driver responds to the need for greater coordination and integration of the myriad of standards and infrastructure development initiatives currently taking place across the industry. Standards are necessary for systems to interoperate. However, it is important to note that the standards developed by the industry must also work together or these very standards contribute to the greater problem of balkanized systems on large scales.

Development of an industry-level architecture is a necessary response to the need for greater integration within, and between, standards communities, as well as enterprises. The energy industry has had some painful examples of system installations that failed to scale to large numbers, or to interoperate effectively with systems from different vendors. An architecture will play a critical role in developing and integrating future standards by providing a context and a larger-scoped framework than is normally considered by a single standard. Only in this way can standards hope to interoperate today and scale to address the needs of tomorrow.

Driver 4: Response to new and emerging requirements

The fourth IntelliGrid Architecture driver arises from emerging enterprise-level and industry-level requirements. Since new system requirements appear constantly, any proposed power system must be robust enough to both anticipate and adapt to changing requirements. Many systems that are installed today will eventually require upgrading to meet future requirements. Systems that are inadequately specified to meet future needs are effectively obsolete, even before they are installed.

The IntelliGrid Architecture project has particularly emphasized system requirements to capture scenarios involving future operations. These requirements for future system functions originate from a variety of sources. Most requirements are constructive in nature and seek to add capabilities or integrate with more systems. Other requirement sources, however, can be bluntly described as ‘hostile’. While advances in new communication, embedded computing, and information technologies can provide significant benefits, they also bring with them a serious dark side that must be addressed. System architects designing future energy provisioning systems must be concerned with meeting plausible requirements from an expanding set of hostile sources. In addition to cross-industry integration, requirements are emerging in key areas of policy-based systems management and cyber security. That which was once deemed a reasonable level of protection is inadequate today and for the future.

It should be noted that IntelliGrid Architecture project emphasizes that it is not only important for the energy industry to use new and emerging technology, but also vitally important to address how the technology is implemented.

Driver 5: An industry vision to enable a robust future

Finally, IntelliGrid Architecture project is about creating a vision for the future and embarking on robust and strategic pathways to enable applications envisioned today, as well as those not yet imagined. To operate in a manner unimpeded by traditional thinking, an industry architecture must address the former and enable the latter.

The IntelliGrid Architecture project has created plausible scenarios for future operations that extend beyond traditional energy service provisioning. IntelliGrid Architecture’s reach extends from central generation systems and natural direct energy sources to operations within and between consumer end-use equipment. IntelliGrid Architecture goes beyond the flow of electric energy into end-use equipment to encompass performance and functions both within and peripheral to this equipment. By definition, an architecture at this level must be used for visioning with a scope broad enough to embrace the future effectively. This visioning is not exhaustive within IntelliGrid Architecture, but rather representative of the types of interaction and integration that are both useful and possible within the energy services industry.

IntelliGrid Project Scope

The scope of IntelliGrid Architecture project, by definition, must consider the entire energy enterprise: the power engineering and information technology/distributed computing elements. Since the distributed computing systems must support both power engineering applications and information systems, the requirements for the future distributed computing system are subordinate to the needs of the power engineering and business support systems and to the system management functions. IntelliGrid Architecture is required to integrate customer interaction, power system monitoring and control, energy trading, and business information systems. It will reach across customers, feeders, substations, control centers and energy traders.

IntelliGrid Architecture is a roadmap for a next generation power system consisting of automated transmission and distribution systems that support efficient and reliable supply and delivery of power. The goal is to create a power system capable of handling emergency and disaster situations, while also able to accommodate current and future utility business environments, market requirements, and customer needs.

“We have a digital economy and we're still trying to provide power to it through a mechanical design system that was designed over 50 years ago. It is a marvelous system, but we've been effectively borrowing against the future to pay for the present, and the future has caught up with us, we need to build the system to serve the digital society of the 21st century.

...And it's then the controllability of that system. Once we have those digital controls in, we can instantaneously manage the power system so it is self healing, that is it can detect instantaneously a difficulty and correct for it locally so that cascading effects can be eliminated and fundamentally improve the reliability of the system so that computers and other sensitive equipment that has come in over the last decade [are] not upset by power disturbances.”[2]

Adoption of Advanced Tools and Methods

In any vision of the future energy industry, operations will be substantially more complex than today. This complexity must be managed on a variety of levels, including business relationships, regulatory processes, and technology integration. An architecture must account for these relationships and complexity. To meet the challenges posed by this project, IntelliGrid Architecture team found it necessary to innovate tools and methods to capture the complexity of future energy industry operations. This required adopting both systems engineering methods and emerging standards for representing high-level architectures. As a result, IntelliGrid Architecture project introduces necessary terms and language emerging from architecture development and systems engineering communities.

IntelliGrid Architecture is not an endorsement of specific methods, tools, or products

The tools and methods used within this project were selected for the purpose of developing IntelliGrid Architecture Framework. The project used systems-engineering-related standards and notations to document relationships and content specific to those relationships. While these standards and methods represent some of the best thinking in the industry, they also continue to mature as a technical discipline. While the specific tools and methods selected for IntelliGrid Architecture project are useful to define architectural level issues, this generally does not constitute an endorsement of these specific tools. The team selected tools and methods on the basis of the best available approach for defining and evaluating large complex distributed computing systems. However, the underlying systems engineering discipline and the community developing the industry-level architectures will continue to mature. The team anticipates further refinement and improvement of the specific methods and notations used within this project and recognizes that there will be additional valid methods for representing industry level architectures.

Systems engineering methods are recommended

The energy service provisioning industries have reached the point where managing technical and business complexity is of paramount importance. The combination of information technology, advanced automation, and communications systems, (collectively referred to as ‘distributed computing’) does not yet have the technical rigor of traditional engineering disciplines, such as electrical, mechanical, or civil engineering. This requires greater discipline than traditionally used in development or implementation of many advanced automation and distributed computing systems. Systems engineering is the discipline of rigorously defining systems through a series of technical steps where design decisions are traceable back to requirements. The IntelliGrid Project recommends that the next steps in the development of an integrated industry architecture follow the disciplines underlying systems engineering.

A Shortage of Integration and Cooperation, Not Technology

An architecture is fundamentally about integrating a wide variety of components into a coherent and beneficial whole. While there is no apparent shortage of base technologies and components that may comprise the future energy system, there is a significant shortage of interoperability and integration between individual technologies and components. Examples of base technologies include computers, communications, and field devices. The free market does well developing these base technologies and stand-alone products but is not as successful when developing infrastructure. This is understandable since the principal goal for vendors of products is differentiation, not uniformity.

There is a particular need in the power industry for an organized infrastructure (standards and technology) that will enable valuable and cost effective interoperation between products developed by different vendors. Without substantial demand (or pull) from the user community, there is little incentive for vendor ‘A’ to facilitate interoperability with products from vendor ‘B’. Instead, vendors must recognize that interoperation is the minimum common requirement and that differentiation will come from feature sets and service offerings.

Infrastructure Required to Move Energy Industry Forward

For a century the electric industry has focused predominantly on developing the electric system that we know today. The system of power plants and power delivery system components comprise a significant energy infrastructure. This electric infrastructure has grown during a century of technical development and is the most capital-intensive of all the public service infrastructures described as utilities. As we look to the future of this system, it will increasingly rely on another infrastructure that must be developed in parallel to move the industry effectively toward the future.

This second infrastructure, the information infrastructure, will be made up of communications technologies, networking technologies, intelligent equipment, and algorithms that can execute increasingly sophisticated operations functions. This second infrastructure can be collectively described as ‘distributed computing’ since it comprises a variety of technologies that enable the sharing of data and controls within intelligent equipment.

Architecture Defined

An architecture is directed toward the development, integration, organization, and life-cycle management of information technologies and advanced automation systems. The architecture community has developed a few working definitions that can be applied to IntelliGrid Architecture project:

An architecture is the fundamental organization of a system embodied in its components, their relationships to each other, and to the environment, and the principles guiding its design and evolution.[3]

Though there are several different definitions for architecture, all include the following recurring themes:

High-Level Perspective

The most common theme defining an architecture is that it must have a high-level perspective. This perspective enables an organization to view its operations in the context of how it integrates with multiple systems, both within the enterprise and outside of it. The IntelliGrid Project is unique from this perspective as it views the operations of the future electric energy services industry from a high perspective level that cuts across traditional boundaries.

Need for Common Language on Different Levels

The high-level perspectives of an architecture often expose challenges when attempting to integrate business or operational entities that have not considered operations beyond their traditional domain. Bringing these systems together requires effort to develop a common language across all business and operating domains. A common language is required for both business discussions and technical ’computer to computer’ communications.

Life Cycle Strategies

An architecture seeks to develop strategies by which new levels of integration can be achieved across the enterprise and across the industry. Additionally, an architecture examines the system from a long term perspective with an eye to how the system may evolve. A good architecture should require little change over time. Indeed, a strong architecture plans for change and includes a process to adapt and evolve, lest it become obsolete itself.

Integration of Standards and Technologies

The essence of an architecture is the use and integration of standards and technologies into an interoperable framework. In this project, the reader will see several references to standards, technologies and best practices as the building blocks of an industry architecture. However, an architecture is not simply about making better use of standards and associated technologies. Today’s standards and infrastructure are often developed with narrow scopes or with specific groups of applications in mind. In comparison, architecture development implies working within the standards communities to develop methods and strategies through which the standards can work together more effectively. It also means that in some cases, those working on standards and their associated technologies will discover new capabilities and requirements.

Integrating standards strategies is, therefore, one outcome of architecture development. Several examples of standards and technology integration needs have surfaced within IntelliGrid Architecture. The IntelliGrid Architecture framework, if followed by those implementing technologies, will provide a strategic pathway by which systems that were once islands can become integrated.

Recognizing a Variety of Audiences

An architecture addresses technical issues that arise at an enterprise or industry level. The implications of these issues may be manifest at various levels within an enterprise. Architecture development carries implications for both business operations and technical operations within an enterprise. For this reason, architecture development has implications for the high level business process, as well as for lower level tasks, such as just getting two products to interoperate. As such, architectures must address a variety of audiences, ranging from business strategy planners to field engineers. The primary audience, however, is system architects who are concerned with enterprise level systems integration. These individuals are typically associated with either information technology systems or advanced automation systems.

Integration with other developing architectures

IntelliGrid Architecture’s enterprise and industry-wide scope necessarily means that other architectures undergoing development in parallel will become part of the implemented form of IntelliGrid Architecture. For example, other key architectures in development at federal, state and even international levels will need to be integrated with IntelliGrid Architecture to some degree.

Emerging federal and state information technology architectures are establishing policies to integrate information systems within government agencies. IntelliGrid Architecture’s reach will include the combination of information and advanced automation systems needed to integrate with developing federal and state level architectures. Examples of possible integration include business-to-business, electronic commerce, and basic consumer service functions. Policies, including system management and security, must be compatible across architectures to achieve the desired levels of system integration and interoperability. The energy provisioning industry must integrate strategically with other developing architectures to achieve the visions put forward by the industry.

Several emergent architectures that are predicted to be integrated with the energy services architecture are discussed below. It should be noted that these architectures are driven by federal legislation, Government Accounting Office (GAO) guidance, and other mandates that are key drivers:

Federal Enterprise Architecture

The Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) was developed as the result of federal legislation passed during the 1990s. The FEA’s purpose is to integrate the information systems of all federal agencies. While it predominantly targets information systems environments, the policies that FEA presents, such as the development of e-commerce and e-government, have implications for integrating energy industry initiatives. The FEA has been undergoing development for the past several years and represents a serious effort to integrate federal agency systems. Information systems installed by federal agencies must show compliance or migration to the FEA in order to continue to receive funding to support these systems.

Department of Defense Architecture Framework

The Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DODAF) is the architecture intended to integrate the systems of the Pentagon and all branches of the U.S. military. This architecture prescribes policies for integrating information systems and advanced automation systems with military buildings and business systems. Energy systems seeking to interoperate with Federal DoD buildings (for example, building automation systems) will be subject to the policies within the DODAF.

State Level Architecture Development

Many states have begun developing architectures to integrate systems and services at the state level. These architectures are directed toward integrating state office functions and public services, including, but not limited to, state and local public services. Similarly, these architectures will address business and government electronic commerce systems. States, such as Arizona, Ohio and others, have begun establishing enterprise architectures and policies for information systems. In addition, organizations, such as the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, endorse the concept of architecture development. Policies emerging from state architecture development related to security policy management, systems integration, e-commerce and e-government can be foreseen to impact the implementation of energy related functions with government buildings and information systems. 

International Level Architectures

Architectural elements and rules of governance are under development by international communities to address issues such as models of governance and commerce across national lines.

The Products of an Architecture

An architecture is comprised of a variety of elements including requirements, models, analyses, terminology, and recommendations. All of these elements were addressed during IntelliGrid Architecture project.

Recommendations

It has been stated that an architecture is a journey and not a destination. One of the most important outputs from an architecture development effort is a clear view of what lies ahead, as well as the path to get there.

As such, the IntelliGrid Architecture provides a collection of recommendations for using and applying a variety of standards and technologies, which, in turn, can be used as the building blocks of integration. Also included are best practices for the energy industry to follow as the integrated architecture is implemented. In addition, IntelliGrid Architecture project has highlighted technical issues that must be addressed to ’complete’ the standards, technologies, and best practices for the future energy services industry to operate effectively. An example of these issues can be seen in the variety of requirements now emerging for industry operations, which pose unique challenges to future advanced automation systems. Integrating the required technologies is an emerging technical need. These recommendations are presented in Volume IV of this series.

Analyses

The IntelliGrid Architecture also contains analyses that support the project team’s recommendations. The analyses may utilize a variety of methods to understand future energy industry operations. This project used a variety of analysis methods that were based on the requirements gathered during the project, as well as on the team’s experience within the industry and standards communities. However, all analyses, no matter how rigorous, are grounded in human, subjective terms. It is therefore imperative that all decision points are traceable back to requirements. Only in this way are the conclusions meaningful.

Requirements for future systems

For this project, a series of future operational scenarios and their associated requirements were developed. The requirements were developed through a combination of studies and interactions with some stakeholders of the future energy system. The set of requirements captured within this project do not exhaustively cover every possible application of advanced automation or information technology. A comprehensive list of applications could number in the thousands.

It should be noted that the requirements considered in this project were developed for a select set of applications that were believed to carry ‘architectural significance’ for the industry. These requirements and associated operations scenarios, known as ‘use cases’, form a framework of functions that encompasses most architecture challenges faced by the energy industry. Architecturally-significant issues addressed in IntelliGrid Architecture project included challenges arising from implementing systems on a large scale and over a wide diversity of businesses and technical operating environments. These issues include integration and interoperability issues, implementing consistent policies and developing the techniques to manage systems on large scales.

A Model of Future Operations

The IntelliGrid Architecture project also developed a model of future operations using a combination of two sets of standards for architectural modeling. The complexity of the future energy system requires modeling to effectively capture relationships and integration between systems. Developing a model for an Integrated Energy and Communications Systems Architecture prior to its detailed design and implementation is as essential as having a blueprint for a large building. Good models assure the robustness of the design and are necessary for communicating among stakeholders.

Terminology

One of the largest challenges any architecture project faces is bringing forward a common set of terms that are useful for discussions across traditional operating boundaries. Just as a model is critical to communicating among stakeholders, so too is standardized terminology. It is impossible to have consensus on meaning and intent without first establishing definitions for the terminology. It is equally important to have definitions traceable back to standards bodies in order to maintain consistency in meaning across disciplines and industries.

To that end, terminology is presented and used in the model of future industry operations. Ideally, terminology is traceable to the standards that are adopting the terms. Within IntelliGrid Architecture project, priority is given to terminology being developed within key standards organizations.

Vision and Process for a Seamless, Managed Architecture

IntelliGrid Architecture’s vision for the architecture uses an integrated approach to describe the enterprise requirements. An approach focused solely on applications does not easily yield the type of interoperability needed or desired. Instead, a rigorous systems engineering approach was adopted for soliciting requirements from key stakeholders. Enterprise domains tell us what the top level requirements are, and analysis reveals key applications that could realize those requirements. Key applications with the promise of exposing common services to enable interoperability are further explored. Analysis of those common services can allow the team then to enumerate the communication requirements for interoperable systems.

When conducting analysis at different levels (enterprise, application, services, communication), it is important to understand the context of each requirement. A formal framework for capturing the full context of each requirement was adopted. The methodology used by the team separated the description of the systems and subsystems into five different viewpoints. Just as a building plan relies on differing views (plumbing, structural, electrical, etc.) to represent the whole, so too does a communication architecture rely on different descriptions. As seen in Figure 3, the model breaks down into five viewpoints that can be roughly portrayed as describing (1) Who participates, (2) What information is exchanged, (3) How is the data processed or interpreted, (4) Where are the interacting devices located and (5) Which technologies are used to facilitate or manage the exchange.