Open source project combines power management at the edge
FledgePower is a cross foundation collaboration between LF Edge and LF Energy with a reference project for a multi-protocol translation gateway for power systems built on top of the Fledge industrial IoT gateway developed by LF Edge
As power systems transform to include increasing onboarding of renewables, electric vehicles, assets at the edge, or behind the meter, network operators must be able to monitor and interact with substation equipment where a high-volume of data is exchanged with a high-velocity of change. These exchanges require real-time, efficient, robust, and secure communications.
Telecontrol protocols are used at many levels of the system: locally, at various connection nodes of the network, at a central level, and at the interface with network operations. Typically, the proliferation of protocols do not share the same specifications, but they often are handling similar data. Implementing new protocols is costly, can create technical debt, and is time-consuming. To manage this heterogeneous environment, the multi-protocol and evolving protocol phenomena lead operators to run deprecated protocols, as a legacy, for decades.
Having the ability to abstract this complexity of protocols with FledgePOWER will offer power system network operators new tools in a rapidly transforming environment.
FledgePower solves the problem of multiple protocols by providing the industry with a flexible, lightweight, industrial-grade, open source gateway that embeds Fledge. FledgePower also provides a toolbox for simulation, data configuration, and checking focused uniquely on power systems’ protocols translation and power systems’ use cases.
The project was started by RTE in France where its Open Source Program Office (OSPO) developers were looking to make old legacy systems communicate with new systems. This is a problem that all system operators struggle with. RTE started FledgePower because they were looking for a new generation of software that could help them solve a problem and be able to replace the legacy gateways that are already deployed.
“Each component of the system uses a protocol to communicate to the other and to the control room. In the case of multiple systems and tele-control networks, which are actually composed of very different systems, we need to use several protocols,” said project maintainer Akli Rahmoun. ”We need to make all the systems which talk their own language, be able to communicate with each other. And this is where we put something in the middle, which is called the protocol translation gateway, to be able to do this job of translating information, which is actually the same information we collect or deliver.
“For example, we can collect sensor data from the field, from the substations. This information will be described in some kind of way in the protocol and will be described in another way in another protocol. The job of the gateway of the protocol translation gateway is to be able to make this translation from one language to another, or to search in another way from one protocol to another and then get that data up into our system operations,” he said.
The main architecture is Fledge, a lightweight implementation that can be deployed at the edge on very constraint resources. For example, RTE needs to deploy protocol translation gateways in thousands of substations. In the substations, operators need to be able to deploy very small computers to run software. FledgePower can also used at the centralized level using the same algorithms for protocol translation as well as the configuration stack will be used in the main operation data centres.
The project is also making the connection with another reference LFE project called CoMPAS that will provide an IEC61850 configurator that will be use to configure FledgePower.
Another benefit is that the plugin feature of FledgePower which allows developers to add new protocols as a plugin running as a microservice. This means developers don’t need rewrite from scratch and can inherit a lot of the code, but only run the necessary elements. The system is also scalable and can be deployed on a single instance or scale to thousands of sites.
www.lfenergy.org/projects/fledgepower/
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