Outcomes, Insights, and Best Practices from IIC Testbeds: Microgrid Testbed
deployment.
concept to any of these companies, but the
IIC fostered an environment where these
companies connected and realized they
were each working on adjacent technologies
of a microgrid. The three companies focus on
their core areas of expertise, but by working
together, they enabled the conversation
around solutions that deliver value to
businesses and industry at large.
Even utility companies who are not
necessarily looking to have components put
in are contributing to the testbed with best
practices and standards testing. For
example, one utility company is heavily
involved with the Smart Grid Interoperability
Panel (SGIP) and some of their work with
open communication data standards has
assisted in the interoperability between
vendor devices. In this case, the Microgrid
Testbed team did not want to create a
competing quasi-standard, so we have
worked to incorporate into the testbed
some of the technology advancing through
SGIP’s efforts.
Throughout the work of the Microgrid
Testbed, their goal is to ensure it is open to
all other potential companies who have
adjacent technologies, such as companies
focused on software analytics, mobile
technology, historian databases, etc.
So, an important question is: What does the
future of a microgrid controller look like as
the playing field moves from controllers that
do not talk to other c ontrollers, to – as in the
Microgrid Testbed – controllers that do talk
to other controllers? The future state is
where not only the controllers talk to each
other, but they make decisions based on
available data and historical data.
P LANNING
The IIC continues to prove how important
the existence of an ecosystem is to the
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). National
Instruments is a member of the IIC and, for
them, it has been a fantastic way to network
and collaborate on industry and application-
focused innovations.
When working in the new arena of IIoT,
there can be a need for specialized
resources. National Instruments is a large
company and Cisco is an even larger
company. Those two companies had the
necessary in-house expertise and, in some
cases, product focus on this industry.
Bringing it all together allowed those experts
in individual fields to work toward
interoperable components for a complete
solution. As a direct example of the
ecosystem, friendly environment the IIC
creates, if specific expertise is needed,
National Instruments and other members
know where to go shopping. They can find
the
IBM®s,
the
PTC®s,
or
the
SparkCognition®s, etc., for whatever kind of
software or hardware tools may be required.
The core companies that started the
Microgrid Testbed are:
National Instruments, from an edge
measurement and control platform
standpoint;
Real-Time Innovations (RTI), from an
open-communication
protocol
standpoint with DDS technology; and
Cisco, from a physical infrastructure
component standpoint.
The Microgrid Testbed was approved on
March 3, 2015, just under a year from the
founding of the IIC. The IIC provided the
catalyst for this testbed to emerge.
Certainly, microgrid was not a foreign
IIC Journal of Innovation
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