IEEE Electrification Magazine - March 2014 - 91

one subgoal of the trial was to demonstrate that the
performance of automated control of 1 million households is adequate with respect to the business case on
real-time Portfolio imbalance reduction. this business
gives a brP the ability to control the flexible demand and
supply of household appliances to improve its overall
demand and supply balance within a settlement period.
since this settlement period varies in europe from 15 to
30 min, the control actions at the brP enterprise level
should preferably be in the order of 5 min or fewer. in this
way, a brP will have at least three moments during a settlement period to exert its control.
a further subgoal was to demonstrate the ability of the
system to handle variable tariff-based metering data from
the smart meter through the smart grid infrastructure to
the enterprise system for billing and rating. this business
cases assumes real-time tariffs, which implies that prices
can change at any moment in time. billing is based on
integrated volumes and prices over fixed periods, i.e.,
15 min. therefore, the metering interface should be able to
handle both the real-time varying tariffs on the usage side
and the integration into periodic volumes and prices on
the meter reading side.
the field trial in hoogkerk is built around the PowerMatcher technology. the PowerMatcher is designed to be
scalable and applicable on a large scale. the objectives
have proven this in two ways:
xx
Performance of control: to control a cluster of households for a business case, the control signals should
reach the households and the devices fast enough to
support the business case.
xx
Performance of metering and billing: variable pricing
leads to large amounts of detailed measuring data,
which has to be processed by the enterprise system.
a main challenge for the trial was to reach 1 million
households. because of the large numbers involved, it is
impossible to include 1 million real households in the
trial. therefore, a large part of the trial was based on simulated entities. for the same reason, it is not feasible to simulate every single household as a separate entity. the
setup of the trial is shown in figure 9. it shows the hierarchical structure of the PowerMatcher technology with two
levels of concentrators between the enterprise system and
the smart house gateways. the metering data are communicated through the same layered structure.
in figure 9, several components can be distinguished.
on the left side are the real-world components in the
test (encircled in red). concentrator 1.1 is dedicated to
the control of the real smart houses that are part of PowerMatching city, an existing test field in hoogkerk in the
north of the netherlands. concentrator 1.2 is connected
to 100 actual smart meters; this part is dedicated to
delivering metering data without implementing PowerMatcher control. concentrator 2.1 connects concentrators 1.1-1.100 to the enterprise system located in
Karlsruhe, Germany.

1,800
1,600
1,400
1,200
1,000
800
600
400
200
0
30 July 2010
0:00

Active Power-Parking PV (W)
Active Power

1 Aug 2010
0:00

3 Aug 2010
0:00

5 Aug 2010
0:00

Figure 8. The measurements at the Meltemi PVs.

a simulation was set up running 1 million virtual
households on the sh/sG side of the setup. this system
was connected to the PowerMatching city field test to
measure latency of the communication of the control signal coming from the enterprise and reaching the lower
level device agents in the smart houses, both real and
simulated. to connect to the PowerMatching city field test,
some adjustments have been made, which added artificial
delays to the latency. to accommodate for software
discrepancies, two objective agents and several Web services were used to enforce the sh/sG price on the PowerMatching city cluster (figure 10). bids and prices signals
were recorded with the corresponding time at each level
of the simulation to measure the latency.
the results of the latency test can be seen in table 3.
the influence from an objective agent on the sh/sG side
of the simulation reaches a real device in fewer than 5 min
(on average 4 min), thus meeting the desired target. however, there was a large amount of artificial latency, which
influenced this result and could require 1 min to reach the
agents. this artificial latency was caused by the polling
and measurement tactics enforced on the PowerMatching
city cluster. further, an additional auctioneer, Web services,
and objective agents are required to complete this test.
on the metering side, it was discovered that a lot of
time is spent on internal processing of the meter reading
assessment process (e.g., validation, sanity checks, and
storage) inside the application server itself. for example,
the total request/response time for one connection, for a
single meter reading submission to the metering server,
was approximately four times longer than the time
required to insert the metering data into the database.
this difference was the first sign that the application
server load should be balanced over multiple nodes. as
such, further performance enhancements should focus
on reducing the request processing time, e.g., a meter
data concentrator to collect meter readings could be
used and submit them in bulk to the main server. this
way, the request processing time per meter reading can
	

IEEE Electrific ation Magazine / MARCH 2 0 1 4

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https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/pes/electrification_december2022
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/pes/electrification_september2022
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/pes/electrification_june2022
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/pes/electrification_march2022
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/pes/electrification_december2021
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/pes/electrification_september2021
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/pes/electrification_june2021
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/pes/electrification_march2021
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/pes/electrification_december2020
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/pes/electrification_september2020
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https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/pes/electrification_september2019
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https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/pes/electrification_september2018
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