ANFIMAU | Electrical grid control center, replacement of legacy SCADA

Challenge

As the transformation in the contemporary energy system evolves, the transmission system operators face challenges as follows:

A need for better and secure integration of renewable energies.
The increase of measurable and controllable units implies the rapid growth of data volume.
A need for new complex functionality to deal with the volume of events and actions in the electrical system - system monitoring and system assessment, decision support, automation implementation of recast EU and national regulation.
Tightening coordination needs between market and grid to ensure system stability.
Maintenance of a high standard of supply security.

All these challenges increase the demand for relevant software capabilities and new solutions to maintain IT/OT software applications within system operation and to cope with the increasing demand for change.

Approach

Ambitious goal

Our goal is to completely revamp our system operation by replacing all application software systems and integration technologies, such as SCADA, EMS, LFC, CMS, scheduling, etc. We will also add or improve relevant capabilities like dynamic system analysis, dynamic voltage maintenance, automated topology optimization, online analytics, and more.

Leaving slow-changing monolithic applications in the past

Our goal is to create a sustainable and adaptable application landscape that can easily be adjusted to meet changing requirements by replacing, modifying, expanding, or adding relevant modules. It will be reached by transformation from singular product to platform modular approach. Every application shall be composed from products that can easily be changed or replaced. We focus on modularization of applications, loose data- and event-driven coupling of modules, and flexible integration of modules. Integration should be lightweight, flexible, and event and data-driven. Complex and tedious changes of heavily individualized monolithic software shall be avoided where possible.

Utilizing synergy of collaboration

The Project is being developed in collaboration with other TSOs and partners who also face similar challenges. Our solution was planned as an industry pattern and an ecosystem of modules contributed by a wide range of collaborators. The Project will be shared as a vision, architecture, and reference solution with peers in the community, becoming a blueprint for the industry players to quickly respond to the increasing change needs in electric infrastructure management applications.

Participating peers have the opportunity to utilize products and modules developed within the Project, as well as to contribute their own extensions, modules, or experiences. This approach greatly enhances the potential for introducing new products and modules, and allows for leveraging the benefits of scale and scope across multiple companies.

How it works

A guiding principle is the division of previously monolithic or vertical applications into modules within well-defined edge contexts that can work together on an event-by-event basis but can be developed separately to allow separation of concerns.

Disaggregation takes place where it makes sense and where the potential for further use of modules is high, or where vertical consolidation would prevent other modules to apply relevant data otherwise available only within monoliths. For example, a vertically integrated and monolithic SCADA system can be refactored into separate modules for data acquisition, monitoring, control, alarming, etc. These modules can communicate with each other through events. In this way, a monitoring module can be easily replaced with another monitoring module without aecting the data acquisition or control modules, especially when the solution is applied in a dierent TSO. Alternatively, the monitoring module can be enhanced by adding another monitoring module with specific capabilities.

Modules can be leveraged to become “shared services” e.g., a time-series or event archive originally provided with the SCADA capabilities could be reused to store other time-series and event data from and to other modules.

Key business capabilities

Activation of remedial actions
Marine coordination
Scheduling
Enhanced grid models
Grid restoration
Data import and acquisition
Capacity management
Detection (grid analysis)
Communication & coordination
Master data management
Reserve provisioning
Real-time monitoring
Reporting
Data visualization
Outage management
Selection of remedial actions

Key Features

The solution is based on Microservice architecture: the majority of trades are taken from various sources via message broker systems (Kafka, Event Hub, RabbitMQ) and are processed automatically.
Most of the operations are performed in unattended mode in the background with zero-level error grade, leaving a thin UI to provide a quick overview of the current trading state and monitor the health and performance of the system.
The system considers the physical aspects of the transmission of electricity like grid losses and properly reports the outcomes when transferring electricity on long-distances with significant losses (like in the case of offshore power plants or underwater cables between the UK and the Continental Europe).
The system takes care of the financial outcomes by calculating numerous measures over portfolios, grids, countries and customers, reporting the collected data to various external financial systems.
Traders are provided with a possibility to process trades manually, control buy/sell positions and handle outages manually.