News

Just as open source software has transformed automobiles, telecommunications, financial services, and healthcare, The Linux Foundation today announces the formation of LF Energy with support from RTE, Europe’s biggest transmission power systems provider, and other organizations, to speed technological innovation and transform the energy mix across the world.

LF Energy also welcomes four new projects to be hosted at The Linux Foundation as part of the initiative, which will advance everything from smart assistants for system operators to smart grid controls software.

LF Energy is an umbrella organization that will support and sustain multi-vendor collaboration and open source progress in the energy and electricity sectors to accelerate information and communication technologies (ICT) critical to balanced energy use and economic value.

LF Energy will focus on curating reusable components, open APIs and interfaces through project communities that the energy ecosystem can adopt into platforms and solutions. Building the plumbing upon a common infrastructure enables energy companies and solution providers to differentiate at higher value layers and services, while reducing cost and integration complexity at non-differentiating layers. As a result, power system providers will be empowered to achieve time to market, scale and efficiency much faster than ever before.

The new LF Energy projects:
* OperatorFabric: is a smart assistant for system operators for use in electricity, water, and other utility operations. The industrial strength, extensible and flexible grid operations platform provides strategic management of information with a modular approach to applications, easy-to-add new functionality, and open APIs.
* Let’s Coordinate: an extensible solution of OperatorFabric, enables organizational power system coordination, visibility, communication, and workflow between distributed users across national and regional boundaries.
* The PowSyBl Framework: of reusable modular components is a high-performance computing platform that enables grid modeling (e.g., CGMES) and simulation in a highly distributed energy resource environment from system expansion studies to planning and operation.
* RIAPS: The Resilient Information Architecture Platform for Smart Grid (RIAPS) provides core services for building effective, secure and powerful distributed applications. Created at the Institute for Software-Integrated Systems at Vanderbilt University, with support from North Carolina State University, Washington State University, and funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E), RIAPS enables smart grid control software to run reliably, just as smartphone apps run on platforms like Android and Apple iOS that have become industry standards.

To receive updates on the LF Energy project activities and gain insight into how open source is transforming the energy industry, signup at https://www.lfenergy.org/announcing-lf-energy/.

Several distributed power 'apps' were demonstrated March 13th - 15th, 2018 at the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit in Washington, DC to showcase the Resilient Information Architecture Platform for the Smart Grid (RIAPS) -- a research project supported by ARPA-E. The project is led by Professor Gabor Karsai, Institute for Software-Integrated Systems at Vanderbilt University, and is supported by North Carolina State University (NCSU) and Washington State University (WSU). Two distributed Remedial Action Scheme (RAS) apps were shown by WSU that ensure grid stability and resilience: one dynamically curtails a wind farm electric power output to eliminate power line overloads, while the other calculates load shedding options to prevent system collapse when the grid frequency drops. NCSU demonstrated an adaptive distributed control for microgrid synchronization application that provides optimal and stable control during system transients, when the microgrid is being disconnected from the main grid. The microgrid app was combined with a transactive energy app developed at Vanderbilt University with additional support from University of Houston and Siemens, CT. RIAPS is the underlying enabling technology for all these apps, not unlike Android that enables a wide variety of apps for smart devices.

Platform demonstrations shown were the RIAPS development environment and the Time Distributed Coordination service. The development environment includes an application modeling language and an application deployment controller. The time distributed coordination service video showed the utilization of group formation, leader election, consensus on an action and future execution time, along with execution of the action precisely at the same time across the group members.

A paper on "Device Access Abstractions for Resilient Information Architecture Platform for Smart Grid" was included in the June 12th issue of the IEEE Embedded System Letters.

The IoT-Based Transactive Microgrid utilizes RIAPS for middleware. A conference session "Design and Implementation of Safe and Private Forward-Trading Platform for IoT-Based Transactive Microgrids" was presented in Orlando on April 17 at the ACM/IEEE Internet of Things Design and Implementation. This event is co-located with Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E 2018).

A Platform for Transactive IoT Blockchain applications utilizes RIAPS for middleware. A conference session "PlaTIBART: a Platform for Transactive IoT Blockchain Applications with Repeatable Testing" will be presented in Las Vegas on December 11 at the Workshop on Middleware and Applications for the Internet of Things (M4IoT). This event is co-located with 2017 Middleware conference.

Peter Volgyesi from Vanderbilt University will present on "Time Synchronization Services for Low-cost Fog Computing Applications" in Seoul, Korea during the first day of the 28th International Symposium on Rapid System Prototyping (RSP). This event is held as part of will be part of Embedded Systems Week.