A scalable, secure, and semantically interoperable client for cloud-enabled Demand Response

Abstract

Demand Response (DR) is becoming a cornerstone element in the current energy sector, particularly for the EU energy markets. For this reason, considerable effort has been spent on standardising demand response data models. As a result, there is an ever-growing number of demand response proposals based on these standards. However, these proposals are usually centralised, and those that rely on cloud solutions use the cloud as a centralised data store assuming that the data is already homogenised when stored, i.e. all the data has the same format and model. Nevertheless, in practise, DR proposals rely on several components that provide data in heterogeneous formats and models. Furthermore, the different DR standards define models for different data formats that hinder data exchange between different DR systems. In this article, a generic tool called CIM is presented, which allows existing DR systems to distribute their components in the cloud, providing a solid security and privacy framework for data exchange. In addition, the CIM implements a semantic interoperability layer that is capable of translating data into a normalised form when exchanged so that it can be transparently consumed by DR components. Experiments advocate the CIM as a solution for DR systems to decentralise their architectures and exchange heterogeneous data even with other DR systems that follow different DR standards.