Big data for smart grid operation in smart cities

Abstract

With increasing demand for providing quality power to smart cities, the conventional power grids are making way for smart grids that can accommodate power generated from multiple sources. To facilitate the operation, maintenance and management of the smart grid, thousands of sensors, IoTs, actuators, intelligent electronic devices are deployed in all segments of the smart grid, which involve operations related to power generation, distribution and consumption. These sensors/devices keep generating voluminous amount of data all through the day in smart city environment, and therefore analyzing the Big data so generated is a major challenge especially on two counts. The first challenge is to devise a mechanism to collect heterogeneous data from different sources and the second is to devise Big data analytics to facilitate monitoring, control and management activities of smart grid. In this paper, we identify the key challenges for utilizing Big data generated by the smart grid and develop the analytics necessary for operation, monitoring, control and audit of smart grid. We also discuss the implementation of SWIFT—an ICT backbone architecture for smart cities, which we developed earlier, for smart grid applications.