2012 3rd IEEE PES Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Europe (ISGT Europe), Berlin 1 A Virtual Laboratory for Micro-Grid Information and Communication Infrastructures James Weimer, Yuzhe Xu, Carlo Fischione, Karl Henrik Johansson, Per Ljungberg, Craig Donovan, Ariane Sutor, Lennart E. Fahlén Abstract—Testing smart grid information and com- these challenges, the European Institute of Technology munication (ICT) infrastructures is imperative to en- (EIT) Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sure that they meet industry requirements and stan- Labs has introduce the action-line Smart Energy Systems dards and do not compromise the grid reliability. Within the micro-grid, this requires identifying and (SES) to develop a Europe-wide coalition of academic and testing ICT infrastructures for communication between industrial partners and resources in the ICT sector to ac- distributed energy resources, building, substations, etc. celerate innovation in energy management and green ICT To evaluate various ICT infrastructures for micro-grid management. The virtual micro-grid laboratory described deployment, this work introduces the Virtual Micro- in this work is part of the EIT ICT Labs SES virtual smart Grid Laboratory (VMGL) and provides a preliminary analysis of Long-Term Evolution (LTE) as a micro-grid grid laboratory activity, where academic and industrial communication infrastructure. partners from six European countries have joined forces to create a large-scale pan-European smart grid lab. Within the EIT ICT Labs SES, and motivated by ongo- I. Introduction ing smart grid pilot research within the Stockholm Royal With the recent technological advancements in com- Seaport project, partners from industry and academia munication infrastructures, mobile and cloud computing, have combined resources to develop a virtual laboratory smart devices, and power electronics, a renewed interest in for testing ICT infrastructures within the micro-grid. Dis- power systems research has emerged. When these enabling tributed across multiple academic and industrial research technologies are jointly utilized to sense and actuate power labs, this virtual lab provides unprecedented capabilities of generation, distribution, and demand, the resulting smart- evaluating ICT infrastructures for performing energy man- grid has unprecedented capabilities [1]. Some of these agement related services, such as distribution automation, capabilities include remotely detecting the statuses of demand response, and micro-grid control. As a preliminary electricity generators, transmission lines and substations; deployment, the virtual micro-grid lab is designed as a monitoring electricity consumption; adjusting the power city-level distribution network for evaluating distribution consumption of household applications to match supply, automation and demand-response capabilities1 In this and reducing energy losses while increasing electricity grid work we describe the virtual micro-grid lab architecture, reliability. As smart-grids begin to emerge, it is imperative present the first results using the virtual lab, and identify to identify and evaluate critical components within the future planned extensions and testing scenarios. physical, computational, and communication architectures The remainder of this work is organized as follows. The for both commercial product development and societal following section describes the high-level hardware, soft- acceptance. ware, and communication architecture of the virtual lab. Within the smart-grid design hierarchy, micro-grids Section III presents testing requirements and an evaluation represent localized power grids containing both distribu- of Long-Term Evolution (LTE) as a ICT infrastructure for tion and generation and arguably have the most to gain micro-grids. The concluding section provides a discussion from developing new technologies for power conservation, and identifies future work. distribution, and localized control. As such, micro-grids II. Virtual Micro-Grid Lab Architecture present many new challenges from the standpoint of con- trol and communication infrastructures. In response to The virtual lab exists as a collaborative project between academic and industrial partners within the EIT ICT Labs J.Weimer,Y.Xu,C.Fischione,andK.Johanssonarewith to investigate ICT infrastructures for micro-grid com- the ACCESS research center, School of Electrical Engineering, munication and control. Each participant has employed KTH Royal Institute of Technology, 10044 Stockholm, Sweden. {jweimer|yuzhe|carlofi|kallej}@kth.se their respective expertise to develop specific micro-grid P. Ljungberg and C. Donovan are with Ericsson Research, 16480 components and functionality, as illustrated in Fig. 1.The Stockholm, Sweden. {per.ljungberg|craig.donovan}@ericsson.com L. Fahlén is with the Swedish Institute of Computer Science 1While the virtual lab, in its current deployment, does not contain (SICS), 16429 Kista, Sweden. [email protected] distributed generation capabilities and would more accurately be A. Sutor is with Siemens corporate research and is the action line classified as a city-level distribution network, inclusion of distributed leader of the European Institute of Technology (EIT) Smart Energy generation and storage into the virtual lab are underway. Thus, for Systems (SES) action line, Infopark 1/E - Neumann Janos utca, 1117 purposes of naming continuity in future publications, we refer to the Budapest, Hungary. [email protected] virtual lab as a micro-grid. 978-1-4673-2597-4/12/$31.00 ©2012 IEEE 2 house EMS via a ZigBee home automation profile adaptor in the OSGi residential gateway. A micro-grid could consists of a suburb having 10,000 smart houses. While each smart house has local control and scheduling capabilities for smart appliances and the home automation system, to ensure micro-grid stability and functionality requires the global management of per- Fig. 1. Virtual Laboratory Architecture. tinent information such as current generation and demand profiles. The coordination of this micro-grid information is handled by the information management systems as physical architecture is such that each academic and indus- described in the following subsection. trial member participating in the laboratory can exploit local expertise to develop micro-grid functionalities. Then B. Information Management as a collaboration, these individual components are evalu- In order to meet the constraints on demand and ated over various communication networks for the purpose distributed generation, information must be shared be- of hardware-in-the-loop evaluation of the communication tween the end-user smart-homes. Within the micro-grid, infrastructure. As depicted by Fig. 1, the virtual micro- there are three prominent information management sys- grid lab architecture consists of three main components, tems, namely the demand response management system (a) micro-grid communication infrastructures for micro- (DRMS), the smart house energy management system grid applications such as inter-substation communication, (EMS), and the end-user home control application. The substation-to-building communication, and distributed en- remainder of this subsection describes the DRMS, EMS, ergy resources, (b) micro-grid information management and the home control application in detail. systems for distribution automation, demand-side schedul- The DRMS is responsible for generating demand re- ing, distributed generation/control, and the smart home sponse messages, at the micro-grid level, based on the cur- energy management system (EMS), (c) communication rent electrical load of the power grid and the anticipated technologies and incorporation of smart appliances within future demand. The purpose of the DRMS in generating the smart home EMS. The following subsections respec- demand response messages is to promote grid stability and tively discuss the Smart House, Information Management, environmental responsibility by offering incentives to end- and Communication Infrastructures utilized within the users for adjusting their power usage by providing future virtual lab in detail. electric pricing and CO2 emission figures. Additionally, the demand response message may contain an explicit A. Smart House load-reduction request based on contractual agreements The smart house represents the lowest-level component between the electric provider and end-users. The demand of the virtual lab and consists of all the physical devices response messages are transmitted via a communication which exist inside a smart home. The devices contain- network to the EMS local to each end-user. ing communication capabilities consist of the residential The smart house EMS is responsible for locally schedul- gateway, smart appliances, and the home automation sys- ing end-user smart appliances at the residential level. The tem. Specifically, the smart home interfaces to the micro- EMS interprets the messages generated by the micro- grid via a smart home EMS which coordinates with the grid demand response management system (DRMS) and home automation system and smart appliances through schedules the smart devices based on end-user preferences, a residential gateway. The remainder of this subsection prior contractual agreements, and knowledge of control- describes each component of the smart house in detail. lable smart devices. Within the virtual micro-grid lab, the The residential gateway serves as a platform for hosting EMS is implemented in Java as an OSGi bundle and is the smart home