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.
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.
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.
