Control architecture of power systems: Modeling of purpose and function

Many new technologies with novel control capabilities have been developed in the context of “smart grid” research. However, often it is not clear how these capabilities should best be integrated in the overall system operation. New operation paradigms change the traditional control architecture of power systems and it is necessary to identify requirements and functions.

How does new control architecture fit with the old architecture? How can power system functions be specified independent of technology? What is the purpose of control in power systems? In this paper, a method suitable for semantically consistent modeling of control architecture is presented. The method, called Multilevel Flow Modeling (MFM), is applied to the case of system balancing.

It was found that MFM is capable of capturing implicit control knowledge, which is otherwise difficult to formalize. The method has possible future applications in agent-based intelligent grids.