Semantic interoperability as a service for the smart energy system

Haghgoo, Maliheh; Monti, Antonello (Thesis advisor); Decker, Stefan Josef (Thesis advisor)

1. Auflage. - Aachen : E.ON Energy Research Center, RWTH Aachen University (2023)
Book, Dissertation / PhD Thesis

In: E.ON Energy Research Center : ACS, Automation of Complex Power Systems 120
Page(s)/Article-Nr.: 1 Online-Ressource : Illustrationen, Diagramme

Dissertation, RWTH Aachen University, 2023

Abstract

The evolution of the smart energy system brings several challenges, such as changes in energy demand, grid infrastructure, penetration of renewable energy resources, electric vehicles, and energy storage. Moreover, the amount of available and produced data from various sources is significantly growing in such an infrastructure. Hence, complex algorithms and digitalized infrastructure are expected to integrate and analyze heterogeneous data sources. From the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) perspective, integrating the existing infrastructure into the digitized energy system requires efficient and cost-effective solutions. In addition, the ICT systems of these infrastructures must be able to integrate systems and have a broad adaptation. Besides, the interaction between smart energy platforms, software systems, and interfaces from different service providers needs to be considered. Due to heterogeneous representations of data sources, such an ICT infrastructure faces information integration and interoperability challenges between the various software systems and interfaces. Therefore, recently heterogeneous data integration and interoperability get more focused on many sectors where integrated information could be beneficial, combining data residing in different sources and providing users with a unified view of them. Mainly heterogeneous data integration and interoperability can be addressed by giving comprehensive information about the system or using services to harmonize the information. This dissertation identifies the following significant requirements to improve the smart energy system’s heterogeneous data integration and semantic interoperability based on a review of existing approaches and their shortcomings. The requirement of extensibility(1) is motivated by the expected and observed number of existing ontologies and services. A specialized solution that is completely open source and has to be reusable(2). Heterogeneous data integration requires flexible and modular management of input and result data (3). Finally, interoperability (4) is required to enable the coupling with other devices, platforms, or services. Major Scientific Contributions: As the main contribution of this dissertation, a service-oriented architecture is proposed to facilitate heterogeneous data integration and provide interoperability in the smart energy system. The proposed architecture is utilized by three primary services that are based on the mentioned requirements. Ontology-driven methods and the semantic web are the fundamental part of developing services to address the requirement of heterogeneous data integration and achieve interoperability besides overcoming the limited domain-specific information of the single application. According to the interoperability classification (syntactic, semantic, device, and platform), the contributions of this dissertation are shaped. In this regard, SARGON, an extendable, modular, and reusable ontology, is introduced to cross-cut domain-specific information and address syntactic and semantic interoperability. Moreover, two other services called ENTIRETY and SiSEG are implemented to harmonize data and facilitate the process of heterogeneous data integration and address device and platform interoperability, respectively. SARGON, ENTIRETY, and SiSEG are embedded in a framework facilitating flexible scenario creation and harmonizing information. The harmonized data can be post-processed in a dedicated application that abstracts from the developed ontology. The developed ontology and services of the proposed interoperability architecture are introduced and assessed comprehensively throughout this dissertation with respect to all four identified requirements.

Institutions

• E.ON Energy Research Center [080052]
• Institute for Automation of Complex Power Systems [616310]