Development of middleware applied to microgrids by means of an open source enterprise service bus

Abstract

The success of the smart grid relies heavily on the integration of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) and interoperability among the hardware elements that are present as part of either the smart grid itself or in a smaller size deployment, such as a microgrid. Therefore, establishing an accurate design for software architectures that guarantee interoperability and are able to abstract hardware heterogeneity in this application domain, along with a clearly defined procedure on how to implement and test a solution like this, becomes a desirable objective. This paper describes the requirements needed to design a secure, decentralized and semantic middleware architecture for microgrids and the procedures used to develop it, so that the mandatory software components that have to be encased by the solution, as well as the steps that should be followed to make it happen, become clear for any designer, software architect or programmer that has to tackle similar challenges. In order to demonstrate the usability of the ideas put forward here, two successful pilots where middleware solutions were created according to these principles have been described.