Software architecture for a smart grids test facility

In the joint smart grids application project “Intelligent low voltage grid” of SIEMENS and Vienna University of Technology, households are emulated with transformers representing photovoltaic facilities and current sinks representing the loads. The purpose is to test new control concepts in small scale before a field trial. One example is the use of smart meter measurement for controlling a local transformer´s tap changer. For the interconnection and management of the emulation devices, a software infrastructure is needed. In this paper, the basic design of the software components and their interactions are presented. It is a flexible, extendable architecture which consists of a central server and multiple specialized clients. A communication service based on remote procedure calls was written, where Google Protobuf is used for the data exchange. In two applications, the realization of the concept is demonstrated.