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This section evaluates the existing and emerging
technologies, standards and best practices against IntelliGrid Architecture requirements and
reference model. It focuses on what technologies best enable building the new
architecture on top of what exists now and what will emerge in the future. The
recommended technologies, standards and best practices are pertaining to the
creation, storage, exchange and usage of various forms of power system
information. Specifically, they cover the following technology areas:
·
Network and System Management Technologies
·
Data Management Technologies
·
Platform technologies
·
Communication Infrastructure Technologies
·
Security Technologies
The recommendations are derived from intensive
architecture analyses. Criteria for selecting particular technologies included:
·
Satisfaction of the architectural significant
requirements as well as the common services and generic interface.
·
Market acceptance of a technology.
·
Evaluation of a technologies use in what IntelliGrid Architecture team sees as the direction of technology in general. Specifically the team sees Web based
technologies as increasing in use. Key
technologies moving forward include
o
Web Services related technologies
o
Model/ontology enabled technologies
o
Open technologies.
It should be noted that IntelliGrid Architecture team
believes that selecting individual technologies as recommended ones is not
beneficial to the industry. Rather, IntelliGrid Architecture team believes that it is better to put forward a technology independent
architecture as well as examples of how it might be implemented using existing
technologies. Consequently, the technology discussion in this section should
not be seen as singling out technologies as the ones that utilities should use,
but only as providing a structure and strategy with which utilities may make
their own choices.
Each of the five technology area subsections
contains three parts:
·
Technology analysis/evaluation
·
Technology integration
·
Analysis of gaps, overlaps, and harmonization
efforts.
Detail analysis/evaluation of technology
actually appears in appendices. This section is limited to conclusions and key
points uncovered during technology analysis.
That is, this section only contains a discussion of the capabilities of
a few key technologies as well as an overview of a comparative analysis of
current widely used ones.
The technology integration section deals with
integration issues related to the mixed use of widely used technologies. It is anticipated that most utilities will
have a non-uniform approach to the application of technology even for a similar
set of requirements. Consequently, it is
important to describe how a uniform architecture can be built in spite of this
heterogeneity.
The third part contains a description of the
identified gaps, overlaps and inconsistencies among the technologies and
standards as well as an overview of harmonization efforts occurring in the
relevant standard organizations.
As describe above, the reader needs to be
aware that different technologies are applicable to different
environments. For example, the device
level security will likely require different technologies than the enterprise
level security.
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