industry highlights
Summary of the Next Generation Grid Data Architecture and Control Workshop
The Next Generation Grid Data Architecture and Control Workshop was co-sponsored by CURENT and NRECA
(National Rural Electric Cooperative Association) on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of
Energy Delivery and Energy Reliability and the National Science Foundation (NSF) on November 17 and 18,
2014, at facilities provided by the NRECA in Arlington, Virginia. The purpose of the workshop was to assemble
experts on information management and the electric grid domain to define objectives and identify research
gaps in the data architecture necessary to support advanced grid modeling and analytics. The workshop had
over 75 participants representing vendors, utilities, national laboratories, research institutes, academia and other
stakeholders.
The workshop discussion highlighted two disparate architectural approaches - application centric vs. data centric
architectural and suggests a research roadmap that addresses these two main alternatives. It was determined
that further research is needed on how these two approaches can be aligned and iterated to converge toward an
overall solution.
High-level workshop discussion themes were used to develop a roadmap for future research that are summarized
as follows:
1. Produce a top-down, application-oriented data architecture and taxonomy at a high level that can serve as a
reference standard (not mandated, but one that emerges as an implementable consensus).
2. Build a well-defined bottom-up set of use cases for innovative data exploitation that drives the data
architecture and analytics requirements and that:
• Includes consumption and distribution of information among multiple data sources and sinks including
data hosted in the cloud
• Includes specific examples of high data rate and high data variety information sources and sinks
• Accommodates methods to improve data quality
• Challenge the research community to develop affordable, new analytics and applications
• Addresses the challenges of sharing data among utilities and system operators
3. Based on an alignment of the top-down and bottom-up approaches, create a data service framework from
open source components that addresses use-case requirements.
4. Select a technique successfully used within other industries (e.g., the healthcare or the financial sector) that
can be applied to the management of utility metadata.
5. Conduct demonstrations within the electric industry across diverse application domains for implementation of
the metadata management solution and data service framework.
internships
Recent internships for CURENT students:
Our 2015 site visit is coming up
in October. Mark your calendars.
We hope to see you then.
Micah Till - ABB
Jason Guo - Dominion
Yutian Cui - ABB
Jidong Chai - China Southern EPRI
Xin Fang - Dominion
Hesen Liu - Dominion
Jared Baxter - ORNL
Yu Xia - ISO New England
Micah Till - Dominion
Xiaohu Zhang - ORNL
Haoyu Yuan - ABB
Genevieve De Mijolla - ISO New York
Linquan Bai - ABB
Bin Wang - ISO New England
Jidong Chai - PJM
Christoph Lackner - ISO-New England
Jessica Boles - ORNL
Ashlund Nicholas - Rockwell Collins
Benjamin Dean - Southern Co. Saptarshi Bhattacharya - IBM Reseach
Guangyu Feng - Mitsubishi
Stephanie Steren-Ruta - Southern Co.
Ailin Asadinejad - MISO
Weimin Zhang - Tesla Motor Co.
Bin Wang - ISO New England Qinran Hu - ORNL
Wei Li - Royal Institute of Technology
newsletter Summer 2015
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