The VOLTTRON™ Platform—A Secure Capability for Coordination
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VOLTTRON™ Provides Other Secure Solutions for Buildings, Potential Grid and More Uses Buildings efficiency: Although most buildings VOLTTRON™ are designed to support energy efficiency features, offers a wide VOLTTRONTM can be hosted on often these features are not fully deployed. range of prospective inexpensive computing devices. VOLTTRON™ enables enhanced supervisory applications. The The VOLTTRON™ control for the automation systems that manage technology’s ability to gather data—and then heating, cooling, lights and other functions in disposition the data to improve an operation or Platform—A Secure buildings. V-agents, via automation systems, process—provides use opportunities in many areas, gain access to HVAC and other data, identifying including: Capability for and diagnosing problems, such as erroneous » Data management and analytics for building Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) temperature settings. The technology offers operations (controllers, meters, occupancy Coordination and created VOLTTRON™, and with funding from the passive capabilities that report a problem, as well sensors, etc.) U.S. Department of Energy, continues to develop as active approaches that actually fix the problem. Control the technology and its capabilities. By addressing these deficiencies, buildings can be » Improved interoperability between utility systems made significantly more energy efficient without and proprietary home energy technologies VOLTTRON™ is an open source distributed Key Benefits impacting functionality or occupant comfort. » Cybersecurity control and sensing software platform. Cost- » Cost-Effective – Open source software Integration of distributed energy resources » Energy efficiency in non-building disciplines, (free to users) and can be hosted on (DERs) at the grid’s edge: In addition to such as irrigation. effective, scalable and secure, this technology inexpensive computing resources building systems, VOLTTRON™ can support the improves the control of heating, ventilation VOLTTRON™’s adaptability has significantly » Scalable – Can be used in one building integration of distributed energy resources (DERs), and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, electric or a fleet of buildings such as wind and solar generation, into the power expanded its potential. Users are applying the supply. For example, V-agents, detecting grid platform in ways not originally envisioned. vehicle chargers, distributed energy resources » Interoperable – Provides the ability to imbalances caused by a lack of wind power, can such as renewables and batteries, entire building interact and connect with a wide variety of systems and subsystems, both in and marshal temporary efficiency actions in buildings ABOUT PNNL power loads and more. VOLTTRON™ also to reduce power consumption, initiate virtual outside of the energy sector storage options, rapidly respond to grid requests Interdisciplinary teams at Pacific Northwest offers powerful data management capabilities for » Secure – Underpinned with a robust to immediately increase or decrease building National Laboratory address many of America’s a broad range of potential applications. security foundation to combat today’s power usage, and manage demand response most pressing issues in energy, the environment cyber vulnerabilities and attacks. approaches. Such actions at the “edge” of the grid and national security through advances in basic The following pages of this brochure provide can ultimately improve grid performance and and applied science. Founded in 1965, PNNL an overview of the VOLTTRON™ platform’s Primary Use Areas employs more than 4,000 staff and has an annual reliability. » Building Efficiency – To help control budget of approximately $1 billion. It is managed components and features, and include: building energy system performance by Battelle for the U.S. Department of Energy’s » A color-coded perspective of the platform » Building-Grid Integration – To support For more information, contact: Office of Science. » Descriptions of VOLTTRON™ features “beyond demand response” approach and [email protected] VOLTTRON™ is available to the public integration of distributed energy resources or for download. Visit https://github.com/ » Other open source software incorporated in into the grid VOLTTRON/volttron to learn more. Dennis Stiles the platform » Transactive Control – To support a Pacific Northwest National Laboratory scalable, distributed control mechanism P.O. Box 999, K9-69 » Examples of how this technology can enable for transacting information about systems, Richland, WA 99352 solutions in multiple use areas. loads, and constraints to deliver user (509) 375-6374 specified services. [email protected] Volttron.org February 2017 PNNL-SA-124042 VOLTTRON™ Services Service Function Actuator Agent Helps enable the control of external devices by V-agents within VOLTTRON™; acts as a gatekeeper for messages that go to the drivers, which interact with devices. The actuator agent also prevents multiple V-agents from controlling the same device at the same time. Drivers Communicate with devices being controlled by the platform. They isolate device-specific protocols from the rest of the platform, and access the message bus to publish device data and receive commands. Currently supports Modbus- and BACnet-compatible device communication. Historian Enables storage of device data and application analysis results in a database (currently MongoDB, SQLlite and MySQL). Management Console Allows administration of nodes running VOLTTRON™ on one or more networks. Information Exchange Bus Provides a conduit for V-agents and Services to publish and subscribe to topics, abstracting device and V-agent details from each other. At the most basic level, V-agents and Services running in the platform produce and consume messages and/or events. Multi-Node Communication Enables V-agents to publish and subscribe to the message bus of a remote VOLTTRON™ platform; communication can be encrypted with ZeroMQ Curve. VOLTTRON™ Interconnect Increases the security of communications within and between VOLTTRON™ platforms, Protocol allowing for message attribution and access restriction. VIP makes it easier to address messages to V-agents on other platforms. Weather Information Retrieves data from the Weather Underground site and reformats and publishes it to the platform, allowing access by other V-agents. V-agents Other Open Source Software V-agents deployed on the platform leverage Strengthens Platform VOLTTRON™ Services and execute specific VOLTTRON™ incorporates a number of open tasks, such as building system fault detection and source projects to build a flexible and powerful demand response. The VOLTTRON™ Platform: Services—Functions that manage and coordinate platform, including: A Color-Coded Overview platform activities, including the operation of V-agent categories include: » ZeroMQ—acts as message bus, allowing data V-agents. The Information Exchange Bus serves » Platform—Providing services to other V-agents exchange Security Module—Capabilities that protect as a central location where data/information comes on the platform » BACPypes—allows BACnet driver to interact against cyberattacks and other vulnerabilities, in and is published, and where processed data/ » Proxy—Acting as a bridge to remote applications with devices supporting BACnet protocol ensuring safe communication between the information and corrective actions are picked up that need access to platform messages and data » PyModbus—enables Python code to easily platform and buildings/devices, and the greatest and communicated back to building systems and » Control—Using data from buildings and other interact with Modbus devices possible level of security. devices. The Historian facilitates data storage. V-agents to make decisions and interact with » SQLite—serves as local data cache V-agents—Individually tailored VOLTTRON™ More details can be found in the Services section devices and other resources » MySQL and MongoDB—serve as additional operatives for specific tasks. Enabled by of this brochure on page 3. » Passive—Subscribing to certain data from historian options for archiving data platform Services, V-agents interrogate systems, Buildings, building automation systems and systems and performing specific actions to » Other open-source Python modules being collect data, identify issues (e.g., temperature set devices—Primary focuses of VOLTTRON™ surface operational issues. used are: point errors) and take actions to resolve issues. capabilities and interactions, though the The VOLTTRON™ platform is designed to - avro, configobj, gevent, flexible-jsonrpc, More details can be found in the V-agents section technology’s versatility extends capabilities to other efficiently facilitate V-agent development and numpy, posix-clock, pyopenssl, python- of this brochure on page 3. types of devices. Data collected from these entities deployment. dateutil, requests, setuptools, simplejson, lead to development of actionable information— zope.interface, pandas, tornado, ply. and efficiency solutions. 2 The VOLTTRONTM Platform – A Secure Capability for Coordination and Control The VOLTTRONTM Platform – A Secure Capability for Coordination and Control 3 VOLTTRON™ Services Service Function Actuator Agent Helps enable the control of external devices by V-agents within VOLTTRON™; acts as a gatekeeper for messages that go to the drivers, which interact with devices. The actuator agent also prevents multiple V-agents from controlling the same device at the same time.