Application of the OPC UA for the Smart Grid

This contribution focuses on interoperability in the overall context of Smart Grids. Whereas Smart Grids are understood as the future energy supply system supported by ICT. For the upcoming need for massive data exchange in Smart Grids both syntactic and semantic issues have to be addressed. In terms of data exchange and ICT semantics are covered by electronic data models representing the real world. Communication architectures including communication standards are dealing with the syntactic aspects. One possible solution for those architectures is the paradigm of service-oriented architectures (SOA). The OPC Unified Architecture (UA) implements this paradigm. The UA is maintained by the OPC Foundation and partly standardized as IEC 62541. It describes a server-client-architecture based on abstract services and an abstract information model which can be used to model domain specific data for general data exchange purposes. In this contribution the application feasibility of the UA is shown based on use cases which were modeled by using the inubit process engine and chosen due to suitable Non-Functional Requirements (NFR).