Organizational Control Reconfigurations for a Robust Smart Power Grid

Large-scale cyber-physical infrastructures, such as the Smart Power Grid, are envisioned as some of the core elements of the future Internet of Things. These critical infrastructures move more and more beyond centralized management and control by system operators and administrators. Overloading and failures in the Smart Power Grid threaten the matching of demand-supply especially when new emerging technologies are integrated such as micro-generation, renewable energy resources and electrical vehicles. The integration of these technologies in the Smart Power Grid make the concept of Internet of Things highly applicable in the energy domain. The introduction of automated and decentralized protection mechanisms requires embedded control elements that perform organizational reconfigurations themselves in a spatially distributed environment. The dynamic input and output binding between such control elements is an example of an organization reconfiguration that is traditionally managed offline during the design phase of a cyberphysical system. An introduced computational intelligence for the purpose of such organizational control reconfigurations requires the interoperation with the rest of the control logic during runtime. This book chapter illustrates a model that makes this interoperation possible: ALSOS-ICS, the Application-level Self-Organization Services for Internet-scale Control Systems. Four incremental protection levels for the robustness of the Smart Power Grid illustrate the requirements of organizational control reconfigurations and the applicability of ALSOS-ICS in this domain.