Advancement of a Sensor Aided Smart Grid Node Architecture

Flexible, extensible and lightweight architectures are necessary to allow the participation of small energy producers in the smart grid. In addition to an intelligent energy management system on top of a home automation system these nodes exchange information with other smart grid nodes to enable services like energy trading or demand side management as well as to establish a stable and scalable smart grid. In order to support future developments in the areas of sensing and metering devices, actuators, production and storage technologies and communication protocols a flexible and extensible design is essential. Besides the mentioned areas the proposed architecture supports a distributed deployment on small and energy-saving computing devices to decrease visibility and energy consumption as much as possible. In the further implementation of the layered approach we distinguish between the core system and functional components. Connected via an enterprise message bus the functional can be implemented using different programming languages and deployed on various networked devices following the SOA principles. The core system includes authentication, configuration, persistent storage and a plug and play registration of functional components. In this paper, the design and functionality of our layered and component based architecture is presented.