The following recommendation sections are a blend of
methods and content development. The recommendations on methods are necessary
to appreciate and use some of the key project content. The future energy
delivery and services industries will provide more function and value to the
industry and consumers, but this will require much more complexity than today’s
systems provide. Managing the complexity of these systems as they are designed
and developed is important to determine how far reaching and effective they
will be. Emphasizing systems engineering methods represents an important
direction for the energy industry to effectively migrate towards advanced
automation.
Achieving an economy of scale and shared infrastructure
sounds great, but how will those lofty goals be realized? IntelliGrid Architecture provides the
next step on the road to deployment of an industry architecture. IntelliGrid Architecture follows
successful strategies of earlier industry standards work, which have
illustrated the benefits of common communications profiles, and well-defined
industry standard object models. IntelliGrid Architecture takes the next step toward fostering a
deployable common infrastructure that can be constructed a small step at a
time.
Codify
IntelliGrid Architecture project work by developing real world designs and implementations
that are used to validate and refine the architecture. It is only by developing
real world designs and implementations that the recommendations from this
project can be validated, more fully developed, refined, and codified. The
architecture and technology recommendations presented here are a roadmap and
guideline for future development, but real equipment designs are necessary to
determine how to bring the necessary technologies together. Further work to
develop the architecture is necessary, but this work should be now specifically
tied to projects directly addressing specific needs.
Incremental
approach: Start small and learn lessons. IntelliGrid Architecture and
technologies must to be immediately employed in designing systems and products.
Projects may be small in scope but should encompass the full vision of how they
may ultimately become scaled and managed in large numbers. The architecture
level recommendations within this project can be used to help define the
technologies that should be considered for any small device that is likely to
become part of a larger infrastructure. This concept is particularly important
for small resource constrained field equipment such as meters, distribution
automation equipment, and consumer portals.
Build
small projects with IntelliGrid Architecture that can be integrated across traditional boundaries.
Projects that particularly achieve integration across traditional boundaries
are important to validate, test and develop the
architecture principles put forward within IntelliGrid Architecture. Examples include phasor
measurement integrated across multiple companies, consumer portals that
integrate energy industry and consumer in-building networks and equipment, and
projects that integrate distribution operations with transmission operations.
These types of projects will bring to the surface detailed design issues that
still remain to fully specify an industry-wide architecture. Particular
attention should be given to managing these cross domain implementations
including security integration.
