Service-orientation vs. Real-Time: Integrating Smart-Homes into the Smart-Grid

Building automation has grown in parallel to energy smart grids without much interaction. However, at present, these two worlds cannot remain separated any more, as long as intelligent buildings become another node of the grid. This paper shows that this integration can be performed in practice as long as a harmonized knowledge/data model for the two worlds can be defined. This paper describes how this harmonized model can be achieved, how it can be implemented as part of a smart grid node, and how it could work and be deployed in a case study.

SOA (especially web-services) is the communication architecture that has been used so far to integrate building automation within other systems but the smartgrid cannot relay in non real- time technologies and the request-response paradigm classically offered in SOA poses an obstacle very difficult to avoid. In this paper we describe an alternative based on an OMG standard, DDS, a real-time message-oriented communication middleware based on the publish-subscribe paradigm.