Architecting the smart grid as a holarchy

Abstract

The ever increasing concerns for energy security, energy efficiency, and sustainable energy is offering various challenges for the power grid. With increasing penetration of the distributed generations, the electricity power system is facing an era of prosumerization, whereby all stakeholders can autonomously produce, consume, import and/or export power. The classical power grid with top-down organization and control does not fit this dynamics, hence reorganizing the rather old architecture of the system is indispensable. In this paper, we propose a generic architecture of the smart grid that fits the new scenario based on the concepts of holons. The proposed architecture of the system is composed of autonomous prosumers that are organized bottom-up in a recursive manner involving various aggregation layers, forming a dynamically reconfigurable system. A corresponding control architecture that employs a holonic approach to simultaneously capture the autonomy of the prosumers, the recursion and the dynamic reconfiguration of the proposed system is also proposed. We extend our work by proposing a service oriented architecture (SOA) framework to support our control architecture.