Resilient Information Architecture Platform for Smart Grid (RIAPS)

The future of the Smart Grid for electrical power depends on computer software that has to be robust, reliable, effective, and secure. This software will continuously grow and evolve, while operating and controlling a complex physical system that modern life and economy depends on. The project aims at engineering and constructing the foundation for such software: a 'platform' that provides core services for building effective and powerful apps, not unlike apps on smartphones. The platform will be designed by using and advancing state-of-the-art results from electrical, computer, and software engineering, will be documented as an open standard, and will be prototyped as an open source implementation. The project will also construct representative open source energy management software apps that will demonstrate the effectiveness and dependability of the system, while offering a starting point for commercial implementations. The platform is expected to become an industry standard on which the Smart Grid can reliably run. Android is a standard platform for smartphones, and customers buy and install apps regardless of the details of the hardware they use - the proposed platform is expected become a similar standard that runs on all Smart Grid devices and support software apps that are provided by various industrial vendors.

Microgrids are seen as an effective way to achieve reliable, resilient, and efficient operation of the power distribution system. Core functions of the microgrid control system are defined by the IEEE standard 2030.7; however, the algorithms that realize these functions are not standardized, and are a topic of research. Furthermore, the corresponding controller hardware, operating system, and communication system to implement these functions vary significantly from one implementation to the next. In this paper, we introduce an open-source platform, Resilient Information Architecture Platform for the Smart Grid (RIAPS), ideally suited for implementing and deploying distributed microgrid control algorithms. RIAPS provides a design-time tool suite for development and deployment of distributed microgrid control algorithms. With support from a number of run-time platform services, developed algorithms can be easily implemented and deployed into real microgrids. To demonstrate the unique features of RIAPS, we propose and implement a distributed microgrid secondary control algorithm capable of synchronized and proportional compensation of voltage unbalance using distributed generators. Test results show the effectiveness of the proposed control and the salient features of the RIAPS platform.

Web: https://riaps.isis.vanderbilt.edu/
Press: https://engineering.vanderbilt.edu/news/2015/vanderbilt-school-of-engineering-partners-awarded-3-5-million-from-arpa-e-for-transformational-energy-technology/