Software-intensive systems interoperability in Smart Grids: A semantic approach

Smart Grid can be thought as integrating the electrical and information technologies in between any point of generation and any point of consumption of the grid. This is a challenging context for the software-intensive systems of the grid, since interoperability among them become a fundamental issue to communicate and interchange data (syntactic interoperability). More than supporting just communication among systems, the interpretation of the interchanged data (semantic interoperability) is a requirement to identify deviations in the grid in time slots as the strict real-time. This paper approach defines a semantic framework which includes a semantic model defined in a powerful ontology language and the proper processing components as the means for interpreting data and for inferencing implicit knowledge. In addition, these both parts need to be integrated into the grid node design for supporting the systems interoperability in all localization and decision levels of the Smart Grid. A case study has been performed to show the feasibility of this approach in the context of an ambitious Smart Grid project and the Spanish electrical grid.