GridStat: Middleware for More Extensible and Resilient Status Dissemination for the Elec. Power Grid

25.04.2002

Foredragsholdere
Dave Bakken

Abstact:
The electric power industry by its very nature must have its supply and demand in very close balance at all times. Supply (generation) needs to be matched accurately and in real-time to demand, otherwise unbalance can result in partial or complete breakdown of the grid.

Recent deregulation in the USA and elsewhere is allowing many more participants in the power grid. Unfortunately, its status dissemination network was designed decades ago for the handful of regulated monopolies of the day, and by engineers who were not experts in computer networking or distributed systems. It is not extensible to new participants, which is a serious problem given the increase in recent years of microprocessor-based secondary equipemnt and other intelligent devices connected to the grid. Its resilience and realtime characteristics are also generally hardwired.

In this talk, I will provide an overview of the power grid and its status dissemination system. I will then discuss GridStat, a publish-subscribe status dissemination middleware framework we are developing for the power grid and other critical infrastructures. GridStat has a publish-subscribe architecture that optimizes performance and resource usage based on the semantics of the particular status items being delivered. It supports a CORBA-compliant API for ease of integration into multiple programming languages. It provides multiple quality of service (QoS) properties: fault tolerance, realtime performance, and network security (confidentiality, integrity, non-repudiation). The degree of each QoS property can be tailored for the particular status item by publishers, subscribers, and hierarchical QoS managers (operated for example by a power company or an ISO).



Biography:
Dave Bakken is an assistant professor of computer science at Washington State University. He is an experimental systems researcher in the areas of distributed systems, fault tolerance, and quality of service. Prior to WSU he was a scientist at BBN, where he was an original co-architect of the Quality Objects (QuO) framework, which provides application-level QoS to CORBA applications and has been used in 7 DARPA projects.

More info can be found at http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/~bakken



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