Infrastructure for Intelligent Automation Services in the Smart Grid

The electricity grid is undergoing a radical transformation from a production-driven to a demand-driven energy delivery platform known as the smart grid. The integration of a large amount of renewable and distributed energy resources, together with new patterns of electricity production, accentuates the need for research in information and communication technologies to control bi-directional energy flows. The European FP7 project: “Energy Demand Aware Open Services for Smart Grid Intelligent Automation” is contributing to this research by providing an intelligent infrastructure for service deployment for the smart grid. The project defines a system architecture that provides interoperability between wireless sensors in home area networks connected over the Internet to a service provider function deployed in a cloud infrastructure. A key component in this infrastructure is the Home Energy Controlling Hub that, on the one hand, provides a platform for monitoring and aggregation of electricity consumption data from devices and appliances and, on the other hand, is the link between the deployed intelligent automation services and the home. To ensure openness and simplicity, the proposed infrastructure is based on the representational state transfer style architecture. This is adopted by implementing the emerging ZigBee IP and Smart Energy Profile 2.0 standards that to a wide extend conform with the Internet Protocol suite and state-of-the art web services development.