Integração de dispositivos elétricos inteligentes de abordagem legada em sistemas Smart Grid baseados na IoT

Abstract

The evolution of the Smart Grid towards the Internet of Things (IoT) is an evolution of the electrical system, it is a natural trend, and it foresees great importance in the scope of mission-critical infrastructures for all countries. The IoT-defined Smart Grid system upgrade will potentially lay the groundwork to achieve future benefits, enabling new opportunities in the Smart Grid market to arise and add value through smart innovations and also to ensure better reliability and energy efficiency, which can lead to a reduction in the production cost and systems maintenance at the same time. The fundamental step that is behind the IoT-defined Smart Grid system upgrade lies in the need to adapt the smart grid infrastructure by the digital layer, to turn it comply with the IoT paradigm. For this to be possible, it is necessary to use emerging technologies such as 5G, cloud computing and edge computing. In this context, the interoperability between legacy systems and intelligent electronic devices (IED) used by the Smart Grid has become an important issue, since each manufacturer can adopt a different standard, energy distributors already have their systems consolidated and any change in this balance directly affects the system’s infrastructure. Thus, the integration of legacy IEDs in a Smart Grid environment based on IoT, was accomplished by using the components of the SG2IoT architecture, presented in this work, which allowed the inclusion of multiple IEDs in a scalable and flexible environment made possible by the SG-Cloud-IoT ecosystem. Also, an application for monitoring IEDs using the FIWARE platform was used in order to validate the proposed solution regarding the display of critical information, status of IEDs and other information in real time. Finally, experiments were carried out to evaluate the performance of the solution when subjected to various levels of stress caused by the increased inclusion of the number of devices using legacy Smart Grid protocols, such as IEC 61850 and DNP3.