Functional Smart Grid Application Development

Due to the increasing complexity of power grids, the development complexity of smart grid applications has continued to rise in recent years. Smart grid applications are currently being developed for specific power grids and not in a grid-independent way causing significant repetitive engineering effort. This paper gives an overview of the state of the art of application development in the smart grid domain, as well as approaches that try to cope with the mentioned problem. In particular, solutions are examined where the grid-independent application is modeled using a functional description. These approaches are then reviewed for limitations and weaknesses in order to make suggestions on how an integrated framework for the development of such applications could look like. Finally, an overview of research questions to reach this goal is presented.