Energies, Vol. 12, Pages 694: Standards-Compliant Chat-Based Middleware Platform for Smart Grid Management (Energies)

The evolution of power systems towards the Smart Grid has introduced a significant number of unsolved issues degrading its accelerated deployment. The centralized control of distributed energy resources (DER) by utilizing virtual power plants is one of the essential Smart Grid ideas lacking plug and play capability. International standard IEC 61850 defines an architecture for describing Smart Grid subsystems. One of the main IEC 61850 contributions is a data model semantics describing different subsystems used for power systems production. The potential to utilize data semantics for describing DERs along with middleware technologies such as eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) can significantly decrease the integration timeframe of advanced power systems architectures such as virtual power plants and microgrids. This paper demonstrates the advantages of using the IEC 61850 standard along with the possibility of utilizing XMPP technology and how this affects new control architectures. Additionally, prototype implementation results are shown depending on the different communication infrastructure settings and application types used for DER control.