I submitted an abstract for a talk at Grid Interop today. I have been near academia too long. Abstracts bring out the most pompous side of my writing. Even so, I am sharing this abstraction with you.
Business Innovation and Service Abstractions
True Scalability and interoperability require abstraction and security. Most control systems today expose name/value tag pairs as their interface. This poses two problems. Interaction with exposed tag pairs requires a deep understanding of the underlying systems. Secure interaction with sets of tag pairs can only practically be exposed as monolithic yes/no decisions for the entire set.
The smart grid will require integration with smart buildings and their associated power capabilities. We will need to develop abstract models for system interaction to enable such large-scale system integrations. These abstract models will hide underlying system detail while exposing the diversity of systems for orchestration.
None of this will happen without mature security models. Significant segments of people and businesses will not give up autonomy over their private resources to any third party. System abstractions will make building systems appear as printer drivers do, exposing themselves to owner agents able to negotiate with the intelligent grid.
A service can abstract the operations of each system. This service defines the mission of the internal operations each system. Each building system should defend its mission. Systems that are quite different in complexity and technology can provide the same service. Owners and integrators will be able to compare different systems as to how safe, effective, and economic their operation is without changing the higher level integration.
Services enable security, and security enables allowing the tenant or owner to interact with building systems. Agents can be restricted to which services they interact with, and what performance they request using understandable business rules. This level of abstraction will support internal tenants or third party service managers to safely and effectively interact with the building systems.
Service oriented architectures and integrations make possible large scale interactions. Service discovery enables ad hoc interactions. Services hide implementation details. Service oriented architecture to will enable orchestration of building systems including site-oriented energy generation and storage. New business models will take advantage of these new interactions to drive energy use reduction through innovation.