Framework for the design and automatic deployment of smart grid applications

Due to the rising complexity of application development in the smart grid domain, an integrated framework for the development of such applications is presented in this paper. The framework is based on the standards IEC 61499 and IEC 61850. While IEC 61850 allows the uniform system description of smart grid components, IEC 61499 provides a model for developing distributed applications. The idea of this framework is to encapsulate IEC 61850 functionality in function blocks from IEC 61499 to model distributed smart grid applications. The developed framework consists of three modules. Besides a module for describing the application using function blocks, a further module is responsible for distributing them to an existing device infrastructure. Thereby, it is possible to define constraints in order to find best solutions. Moreover, the structure of the smart grid is only specified in this module. Depending on the selected solution, the respective configuration files of the individual devices are generated automatically, which are then used for deploying the application to field devices. Using a specific use-case, the functionality of the framework was evaluated. In addition, it was deployed to a virtual test environment.