The continuously increasing complexity of modern and sustainable power and energy systems leads to a wide range of solutions developed by industry and academia. To manage such complex system-of-systems, proper engineering and validation approaches, methods, concepts, and corresponding tools are necessary. The Smart Grid Architecture Model (SGAM), an approach that has been developed during the last couple of years, provides a very good and structured basis for the design, development, and validation of new solutions and technologies. This review therefore provides a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art and related work for the theory, distribution, and use of the aforementioned architectural concept. The article itself provides an overview of the overall method and introduces the theoretical fundamentals behind this approach. Its usage is demonstrated in several European and national research and development projects. Finally, an outlook about future trends, potential adaptations, and extensions is provided as well.

The rollout of smart grid solutions has already started and new methods are deployed to the power systems of today. However, complexity is still increasing as focus is moving from a single system, to a system of systems perspective. The results are increasing engineering efforts and escalating costs. For this reason, new and automated engineering methods are necessary. This paper addresses these needs with a rapid engineering methodology that covers the overall engineering process for smart grid applications—from use case design to deployment. Based on a model-driven development approach, the methodology consists of three main parts: use case modeling, code generation, and deployment. A domain-specific language is introduced supporting the use case design according to the Smart Grid Architecture Model. It is combined with the IEC 61499 distributed control model to improve the function layer design. After a completed use case design, executable code and communication configurations (e.g., IEC 61850) are generated and deployed onto compatible field devices. This paper covers the proposed rapid engineering methodology and a corresponding prototypical implementation which is validated in a laboratory experiment. Compared to other methods the proposed methodology decreases the number of engineering steps and reduces the use case design and implementation complexity.

Smart energy solutions aim to modify and optimise the operation of existing energy infrastructure. Such cyber-physical technology must be mature before deployment to the actual infrastructure, and competitive solutions will have to be compliant to standards still under development. Achieving this technology readiness and harmonisation requires reproducible experiments and appropriately realistic testing environments. Such testbeds for multi-domain cyber-physical experiments are complex in and of themselves. This work addresses a method for the scoping and design of experiments where both testbed and solution each require detailed expertise. This empirical work first revisited present test description approaches, developed a newdescription method for cyber-physical energy systems testing, and matured it by means of user involvement. The new Holistic Test Description (HTD) method facilitates the conception, deconstruction and reproduction of complex experimental designs in the domains of cyber-physical energy systems. This work develops the background and motivation, offers a guideline and examples to the proposed approach, and summarises experience from three years of its application.

The transition of classical power distribution grids towards actively operated smart grids locates new functionality into intelligent secondary substations. Increased computational power and newly attained communication infrastructure in thousands of secondary substations allow for the distributed realization of sophisticated functions, which were inconceivable a few years ago. These novel functions (e.g., voltage and reactive power control, distributed generation optimization or decentralized market interaction) can primarily be realized by software components operated on powerful automation devices located on secondary substation level. The effective and safe operation of such software is crucial and has a broad set of requirements. In this paper, we present a flexible and modular software ecosystem for automation devices of substations, which is able to handle these requirements. This ecosystem contains means for high performance data exchange and unification, automatic application provisioning and configuration functions, dependency management, and others. The application of the ecosystem is demonstrated in the context of a field operation example, which has been developed within an Austrian smart grid research project.

Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) are starting to play an important role in today’s power distribution networks. They provide a manifold of services for fulfilling demands and requests from diverse stakeholders, such as distribution system operators, energy market operators, aggregators but also end-users. Such services are usually provided by corresponding Energy Management Systems (EMS). This paper analyzes the complexity of the EMS development process resulting from an evolving power utility automation.

Electric power systems are currently confronted with a fundamental paradigm change related to its planning and operation, mainly caused by the massive integration of renewables. To allow higher penetration of them within existing grid infrastructures, the “smart grid” makes more efficient use of existing resources by integrating appropriate information technologies. Utilising the benefits of such smart grids, it is necessary to develop new automation architectures and control strategies, as well as corresponding information and communication solutions. This makes it possible to effectively use and manage a large amount of dispersed generators and to utilise their “smart” capabilities. The scalability and openness of automation systems currently used by energy utilities have to be improved significantly for handling a high amount of distributed generators. This will be needed to meet the challenges of missing common and open interfaces, as well as the large number of different protocols. In the work at hand, these shortcomings have been tackled by a conceptual solution for open and interoperable information exchange and engineering of automation applications. The approach is characterised by remote controllable services, a generic communication concept, and a formal application modelling method for distributed energy resource components. Additionally, the specification of an access management scheme for distributed energy resources, taking into account different user roles in the smart grid, allowed for a fine-grained distinction of access rights for use cases and actors. As a concrete result of this work, a generic and open communication underlay for smart grid components was developed, providing a flexible and adaptable infrastructure and supporting future smart grid requirements and roll-out. A proof-of-concept validation of the remote controllable service concept based on this infrastructure has been conducted in appropriate laboratory environments to confirm the main benefits of this approach.