A journey towards future substations via an internet of things test environment

The design and evaluation of internet of things (IoT) applications and business models for the operation and maintenance of future substations is a complex challenge. We engaged this challenge with a design-oriented approach: By establishing an IoT test environment embedded in a cross-company collaborative exploration journey, we have ideated, designed, and evaluated IoT use cases. In this article, we describe the technical setup of the test environment and the methods applied during the journey. Subsequently, we show two outcomes of the cooperation project: the first one demonstrates how an intuitive visualization of the IoT data can be achieved and the second outcome shows how processes can be supported by a low-code application. Finally, we give key recommendations for similar endeavours and provide an outlook on operational implementation paths - always touching both technologies and processes.