SEPA's Interoperability Profiles Task Force, led by NIST’s Cuong Nguyen, published its Interoperability Profile for Electric Vehicle Fleet Managed Charging, intended to facilitate the integration of electric vehicle (EV) charging stations with the grid. The profile was developed under a cooperative agreement with NIST and is intended to help meet the pressing need for this infrastructure.
This interoperability profile seeks to implement the EV Fleet Managed Charging Use Case, also developed by SEPA under the cooperative agreement. The use case includes a business case, describing needed functionality and interactions. The use case also has two scenarios for information exchanges between EV charging station management systems and the grid's distribution system operators:
Direct exchanges between the grid's distribution system operators and EV charging station management systems
“Aggregator mediated” information exchanges between the grid's distribution system operators and EV charging station management systems
The Interoperability Profile for Electric Vehicle Fleet Managed Charging maps technical requirements from the use case for information exchanges using smart grid standard communication protocol IEEE 2030.5-2018, including its communications and information model requirements. In the interoperability profile, information exchanges were characterized to support communication between the grid's distribution system operators and EV charging station management systems.
The Interoperability Profile for Electric Vehicle Fleet Managed Charging is intended to inform industry, enable a common language, help stakeholders understand the information exchanges needed to manage EVs as grid assets, and aid development of conformance testing.
Industry is considering developing a complementary profile for the EV managed charging use case. This profile would allow organizations in different standards ecosystems to provide the same grid functionality, thereby enhancing EV and utility integration across more platforms.
NIST's Smart Grid Group leader, Avi Gopstein, was featured on Smart Grid Today'spodcast, released May 12, 2022. Ideally, said Gopstein, smart grid's many disparate systems should communicate and work together. They must allow observation and understanding of the grid and communicate actions, like control or market signals.
Ultimately, a smart grid could do more than today's grid, said Gopstein. For example, smart thermostats could communicate with a utility, thus helping balance the grid. Also, customers could earn credits for renewable energy use. Interoperability unleashes value in the grid in previously unimaginable ways.
However, today's smart grid standards pose challenges for interoperability. Gopstein referenced NIST's review of 240 standards which found that 169 relate to interoperability, but only one in five have independent programs for testing and certifying interoperability. Some standards allow multiple ways to implement a communication protocol or information model. This creates a landscape in which interoperability is nearly impossible to assure without major customization.
To improve interoperability, said Gopstein, NIST worked with grid stakeholders to develop an interoperability profile process, which is described in the NIST Framework and Roadmap for Smart Grid Interoperability Standards, Release 4.0. The process results in an interoperability profile which specifies a way of achieving interoperability for a grid function.
NIST researcher Dhananjay Anand described the process of developing interoperability profiles at the IEEE 2022 Innovative Smart Grid Technologies (ISGT) conference, held in New Orleans, LA in late April 2022. Anand noted that process focuses on a grid function – like communications – and considers those systems involved in achieving it, their related standards and implementation options, and a use case. The process then narrowly defines a way to implement these systems so that they work together and achieve the needed function.
With the increasing use of distributed energy resources (DER) – solar, wind, and more – to generate power, organizations have developed standards for their integration with grid. These include:
IEEE 1547: Defines functional requirements for DER interconnection in varying power conditions
IEC 61850-7-420: Integrates DER functions into communications networks in substation's automation systems
A new NIST publication proposes an interoperability profile and mapping based on these standards. Specifically, IEC 61850 Profile for Distributed Energy Resources Supporting IEEE 1547 defines a path – an interoperability profile – for implementing both standards. NIST researchers worked with grid and DER stakeholders to map a set of IEEE 1547's functional requirements to the communication and data requirements in IEC 61850-7-420. The resulting interoperability profile:
Reduces the complexity of meeting these standards
Facilitates DER integration with the grid
Improves interoperability between DER and substations' automation and control systems
Helps vendors implement inverter controllers without a detailed knowledge of IEC 61850-7-420
Provides a template for developing IEC 61850 profiles to meet other users' requirements
Simplifies and improves testing and certification
Helps develop vendor-independent engineering, testing and maintenance tools for microgrids and other systems with large numbers of inverter-based DERs
The development of this interoperability profile followed the general process which is described in NIST Framework and Roadmap for Smart Grid Interoperability Standards, Release 4.0. Notably, the process focuses on existing standards and clarifies their implementation. The interoperability profile offers an efficient and targeted way of achieving interoperability.
After a year of virtual collaboration, international and NIST researchers involved in a federated 5G Testbed development effort, called “Project Agility,” held a hybrid meeting at NIST's Gaithersburg, MD campus, May 16-18, 2022. Several researchers met in person onsite, and others participated virtually from France, Germany, Korea, and the US.
Project Agility seeks a federation of testbeds to further develop and apply 5G technology. The Project was launched by the Korea Institute for Advancement of Technology (KIAT), a quasi-governmental organization under Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, which supports industrial technology innovation and related policy development. KIAT has welcomed NIST's participation; NIST has extensive experience in enabling frameworks for federations in cloud computing, cyber-physical systems, and more. Other participants include Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in Korea, Mobigen Co., Korea Automotive Technology Institute, University of Arizona, and University of Missouri–Kansas City.
Project participants defined a development path leading to a 5G federation testbed that is representative of the various domains of assets and facilities required for such an ecosystem. They reviewed participants' core technologies and other existing technologies and determined how they might contribute to a federation testbed. A goal of this project is to enable end-to-end service innovation, orchestration, and agile delivery across the industry sectors. It also seeks to enable autonomic network and connectivity formations and orchestrations in response to agile service delivery needs or detected situations and predicted situations.
Project Agility will hold another in-person meeting in several months to further define the overall process and identify contributions and responsibilities of participating organizations.
Candell pointed out that wireless systems are key to the next generation of operational systems in factories, warehouses, retail spaces, automated buildings, etc. Relative to wired systems, wireless networks are easier and cheaper to install and maintain, have a simpler infrastructure, and enable greater system mobility. Wireless networks also could enable more capabilities than they did in the early 2000s, which were primarily sensing. Conceivably, they could control a multitude of systems, collect more data than previously, and thus support greater data analytics.
Yet, wireless systems face several challenges that must be addressed, noted Candell. Many are aware of its limitations in terms of bandwidth, latency, range, and power supply for portability. A major challenge to wireless systems, though, is what Candell calls the "non-pristine radio environment." It includes channel aggressors such as interference from other networks and/or microwave systems, metal clutter reflecting signals, blockages, and more. Candell also pointed out that present standards do not adequately take into account the impacts of such "channel aggressors" on wireless performance.
Candell, thus, proposed the development of the IEEE P1451.5p standard including metrics for these channel aggressors in assessing wireless performance. He also recommended developing profiles – determining wireless performance requirements – for specific manufacturing industries, such as aerospace, automotive, food processing, petrochemical, and others. These metrics and profiles would be based on use cases, collected data, and modeling.
Advances in the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence are part of a new industrial revolution to make manufacturing faster, better, and cheaper. These advances depend on precisely timing the actions of systems and components involved in a manufacturing process. If such coordination could be done wirelessly, even greater benefits might be realized: flexibility, mobility, lower maintenance, and life-cycle costs. However, widely deployed wireless technologies' ability to ensure time-sensitive, low-latency, highly-reliable, and protected communications has yet to be proven.
NIST and industry researchers recently demonstrated a wireless time-sensitive networking scenario, with time synchronization and time-aware shaping scheduling features in a use case for robotics. The results were published in an article, Wireless Time-Sensitive Networking Impact on an Industrial Collaborative Robotic Workcell, in the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics.
The test setup included a "supervisor" system, coordinating data flow between two robotic arms: one moved parts to a work zone for simulated tooling, while the other robotic arm was used for quality inspection of the results. Researchers measured the reliability of data transferred, latency of that transfer, and idle time for applications driving the robots. They also assessed how varying levels of interference impacted the wireless network performance.
Tests showed that latency could be limited to less than five milliseconds for 99 percent of the data packets. This latency could be further reduced by improving the implementation of wireless time- sensitive networking, notably by incorporating new time-aware scheduling concepts. In the future, researchers intend to explore time-sensitive networks, which use standards-based Wi-Fi with newer features and new time-aware scheduling concepts.
NIST's Ed Griffor addressed how a NIST-developed concept could improve the security of cyber-physical systems (CPS) at the National Defense Industrial Association's Cyber-Physical System Security Summit, May 10-11, 2022.
Griffor pointed out that the OES concept could similarly be used to capture the cyber-physical security requirements for any cyber-physical system – automated vehicle or otherwise. Basically, the OES concept could be used to describe the operating conditions that a cyber-physical system is likely to experience, which could then be used to help engineer, test, and secure the system.
Smart Cities Drive reported in its May 10th newsletter on the establishment of the Diversity, Equity, Integrity and Technology (DEI&T) Group as a new focus area within the Global City Teams Challenge to examine methods for integrating concepts of diversity, inclusion, equity, and trust in smart city technology projects. NIST's Michael Dunaway emphasized the need for trust and engagement in smart community initiatives as a foundation for ensuring that the outcomes of smart city investments are equitably shared across all communities, and to assist community leaders and civic officials gain public acceptance of the technology systems that the community adopts.
"The only way to build trust is to have effective ongoing communications," said Ball State University Associate Professor Rebecca Hammons, who leads the new group. As she observed in the article. "How do you build trust with someone you talk to once a year?”
Equity depends on community engagement and the article cited a specific example. Providing broadband and high-speed internet for residents is key to bridging the digital divide – an ethical as well as an economic issue in many areas – and enabling smart communities to expand access and services on a broader scale.
