Application Service in Grid-based Future Control Centers

The changing paradigm of electricity supply industry brings the power industry not only the benefits of economy and efficiency, but the challenges to the operation of the traditional power system control centers (called SCADA/EMS), which were built to automate control functions in electric utilities. The requirement needs the support of the new generation control centers, which should be more decentralized, integrated, flexible and open. Grid technology refers to the coordinated and secured sharing of computing resources among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions and resources. It has been utilized to design the novel distributed power system control centers. The paper presents a framework of the grid- based future control centers, which is developed with Globus Toolkits, and briefly describes its main components and their relationship. Application service, the core component of the proposed framework, provides all the functions of monitoring, control and analysis. Rather than applying one or some features of the grid technology to a certain application, the design of application service will first summarize the characteristics of grid technology. Considering their different requirements for computation, communication, security, etc., various application service mechanisms, especially for those desired but unrealized functions in current control centers, are illustrated, followed by a simple case study.