Automated Deployment of Single-Board Computer Based Grid Measurement and Co-Simulation Equipment

The trend towards more data-intensive communication patterns that are required by many applications in the energy domain leads to having to deploy and manage a large number of devices that collect or forward data. This is challenging, because the physical device locations are often inaccessible, users often do not have the required expertise, and configuration inconsistencies can lead to communication disruptions. We propose an open-source automated deployment approach for a customizable Raspberry Pi based hardware and software stack including fleet management for creating large networks of geographically distributed measurement and communication devices capable of being used for a variety of use cases. We show how our approach reduces the amount of interactions required during deployment and helps to manage large amounts of devices by using two example deployments in the energy domain: Firstly, a scalable deployment of distributed measurement devices for gathering insights of the power grid state or of individual grid connected devices. Secondly, Co-Simulation Gateways that connect distributed simulation infrastructure to perform large co-simulations.