Event- and Priority-Driven Coordination in Next-Generation Grid

The confluence of power and cyber networks is key to the evolution of smart grid (SG). The explosive growth of data in SG to support pervasive communication demands the exchange of essential information guided by need based events. The scaling of such asynchronous event-driven communication for practical utility in SG needs to evolve with information prioritization. Owing to the size of the power grid, it is often necessary to aggregate such event-driven data to reduce the multitasking overhead of higher-level controllers. As such, prioritization of the processing of these event-driven pieces of information is essential. In this paper, using the context of a neighborhood-area network, where communication is enabled between consumer loads and supervisor energy-management system (EMS) controller to achieve balance between demand and supply, a priority-based event-driven communication mechanism is outlined. For that purpose, load-demands are grouped into different classes based on their priorities. The demand processing policy based on dynamic-priorities is analyzed using delay and fairness performance parameters. An optimization problem is also formulated to achieve performance tradeoff between delays experienced by different classes of load-demands and the EMS processing cost. The performance evaluation results show the effectiveness of the proposed priority-based solution.