PowerTeams - Collaborative Engineering of Smart Grid Applications

Motivation and Problems:
The massive deployment of distributed generators from renewable sources in recent years has led to a
fundamental paradigm change in terms of planning and operation of the electric power system. Automation and
control systems, using advanced information and communication technology, are key elements to handle these
new challenges. The electric energy system is moving from a single system to a cyber-physical system of
systems. To counteract the increased complexity that is associated with this change, new engineering methods
have been developed.
It is a common feature of all those approaches that they are monolithic and not well prepared for being extended.
In addition, the interoperability between different engineering services is very limited. Furthermore, they offer
little support for a collaborative engineering process, although it is expected that the engineering of future
energy applications will require cooperation between experts from different domains.
Goals and Approaches:
PowerTeams addresses these shortcomings with the development of a concept of a model-based, serviceoriented,
and collaborative platform for the engineering and validation of smart grid applications. The overall
goal is to develop a scalable architecture of an interoperable and distributed ecosystem that offers modular
engineering services to collaborating teams.
Engineers shall be provided with as much automated support as possible in every engineering phase of an
application’s lifecycle, i.e. specification, development, validation, acceptance tests, and deployment. To some
extent, such automated engineering concepts have already been addressed in previous projects.
These results are integrated in PowerTeams in the form of services. To this end, the architecture of an integration
hub component is developed. It affords the integration of various types of services in an interoperable manner.
The integration hub, which is at the core of the PowerTeams platform, is based on a service-oriented architecture
and makes use of cloud computing concepts.
An approach is being developed that will enable external services, such as the use of special laboratory
infrastructure and data platforms, to be integrated as services via the integration hub as well. A further explicit
goal is to analyse how collaborative engineering concepts can be tailored to the energy domain to support
distributed development teams.