Leveraging industry standards to build an architecture for asset management and predictive maintenance

Abstract

Digitalization is becoming an increasing part of the strategy of many DSOs as it has the potential to create new business opportunities as well as to minimize operation and maintenance costs. Vattenfall Eldistribution sees standard based integration as a cost-effective approach to enable successful smart grid use case implementations. It seems to offer in the long run low integration costs and more importantly a greater flexibility, going from supplier specific integrations to a more generic and vendor agnostic approach. This paper presents the result of a DSO pilot installation taking inspiration from IEC TC57 reference architecture, with the goal to provide substation data from the sensors at the substation to central level data storage and application in order to enable asset health analytics. The pilot has demonstrated that it is possible to provide central applications with information from primary substations in a standardised way. The pilot also shows that a service oriented architecture together with the IEC 61850 and IEC CIM standards is flexible, agile and allow for reuse of information integration flows which means reduced integration costs and probably increased security. Following the successful pilot, the next step is to look at how to fully implement and verify the concept in a real substation and to secure production grade components where prototypes have been used.