Distributed Software Infrastructure for General Purpose Services in Smart Grid

In this paper, the design of an event-driven middleware for general purpose services in Smart Grid is presented. The main purpose is to provide a peer-to-peer (P2P) distributed software infrastructure to allow the access of new multiple and authorized actors to Smart Grid’s information in order to provide new services. To achieve this, the proposed middleware has been designed to be i) event-based, ii) reliable, and ii) secure from malicious Information and Communication Technology (ICT) attacks, as well as iv) to enable hardware independent interoperability between heterogeneous technologies. To demonstrate practical deployment, a numerical case study applied to the whole UK distribution network is presented and the capabilities of the proposed infrastructure are discussed.