Open Standards and Open Source for the SmartGrid

Session Type:

Standard [35 minutes]

Speakers

Alan McMorran [Open Grid Systems Ltd.], Susan Rudd

The electrical power industry has seen a number of changes in its lifetime and in recent years the industry has seen dramatic changes as privatisation; energy markets; distributed and renewable generation; dynamic control and automation; and bi-directional “smart meters” have all increased the complexity of operating the grid and introduced new challenges for collecting and analysing data and integrating a wide variety of systems.

Open Grid Systems has developed an Eclipse/OSGI based model-driven data management application for the power industry that has leveraged Model Driven Architectures (MDA) to help utilities and vendors manage and integrate data from a myriad of data sources.

We’ll talk about how we:

Built a series of frameworks using an MDA built on EMF,QVT and OCL to provide model-driven data transformation functionality that supports the migration from proprietary to standard data formats for electrical network data

Used the Eclipse platform and its associated frameworks to develop a powerful desktop application with data browsing, graphical and geographical electrical network editing capabilities

Faced challenges with integrated multiple, very large data sets with varying levels of data quality that represent the same data but in different structures, formats and levels of detail from completely different system

Had to deal with clients who were frequently unfamiliar with open source and considered it immature software created by hobbyists or believed it would “infect” their existing proprietary code

We are a small company and we’ll talk about how the use of the Eclipse frameworks has allowed us to provide feature-rich applications that compete with similar products from large, multi-national companies (with large development teams and larger budgets). We’ll discuss the problems with dealing with an industry that deals in 10-20 year time scales and where the problems around vendor lock-in are still significant but how the use of international standards can enable small companies to make in-roads.

Finally we’ll talk about the challenges in combining the Eclipse open source libraries, our own open source libraries and proprietary plugins and services with the need to create a viable commercial tool.