Standards-compliant event-driven SOA for semantic-enabled smart grid automation: Evaluating IEC 61850 and DPWS integration

Smart Grid is designated by variety of stakeholders and thus is having interoperability as a crucial prerequisite for successful Smart Grid solutions deployment. The international standard IEC 61850 defines future-proof automation architecture for power systems and represents the most prominent standards-compliant approach which enables optimized Smart Grid control at field level. However, some IEC 61850 components are inadequate to compete with accelerated Smart Grid development. This is most notable in the domain of controlling Distributed Energy Resources (DERs). Middleware technologies which are part of the current IEC 61850 definitions are not suitable for streamlined and large scale integration of DERs. Novel DERs control models such as Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) require scalable and flexible automation framework capable of managing dynamic and reconfigurable VPPs. This issue can be solved by introducing state-of-the-art middleware technologies based on device-level Web services. This article provides an analysis of applying new middleware mapping for IEC 61850 based on Devices Profile for Web Services (DPWS). DPWS inherently supports event-driven and service-oriented architectural principles which are foreseen as integral elements of the next-generation Smart Grid automation frameworks. The cooperation of DPWS and IEC 61850 provides value-added features for semantic-enabled and standards-compliant Smart Grid automation.