InterGrid - Convergent Interoperability Stack for Smart Grid ICT Infrastructures

The power grid of the future, the Smart Grid, is a highly complex „System of Systems“, where the single subsystems often are provided by different vendors. To utilize the benefits of the intelligent power grid, these different subsystems must be able to cooperate. The interoperability of subsystems from different vendors requires standardiation on different levels, ranging from connecting participating components via syntactic and semantic interoperability (transport and application protokols) up to common business models. The concrete technical problems hereby cover unique addressing schemes for Smart Grid resources, standardised data models, assurance of required quality of service (e.g., latency or avalability of services) as well as multi-user access models. The project proposes a meta-architecture, which enables the interoperability of different Smart Grid components on an end-to-end basis by creating an appropriate protocol stack; thus, this architecture works without a central middleware framework.