Most of the solutions adopted to monitor and supervise the electrical system tend to be centralized, i.e. data is sent to a central system to be stored and processed. In recent years many applications were transferred to the Cloud in order to promote their availability, reliability, scalability and replicability. However, the migration of applications to the Cloud has some drawbacks; one of them concerns the time constraints resulting from high communication latency. The Fog/Edge Computing and Software Defined Networking solutions bring the advantages of the Cloud to the field level, making processing and decision-making capabilities available in the peripheral nodes. The processing is carried out close to the process, which reduces latency and the volume of data transferred to the Cloud, and enables the continuous flow (streaming) of data towards the Cloud; Fog/Edge architectures also favor online analysis processes.
During this three-year period of system research, some significant use cases in the electrical-energy sector were identified together with the basic components for the creation of the Fog INtelliGent Edge Reactive (FINGER) platform. The use cases concern the control of a microgrid, the observability of electrical distribution networks, the aggregate management of electric vehicle charging devices, the management of the monitoring of electric vehicle charging profiles, the acquisition of electricity consumption profiles from second generation meters.
The elements of the architecture are able to send a continuous flow of information on their status and processes, allowing for real-time analysis, even automatically by means of Machine Learning algorithms. The platform also allows for the evaluation of new architectural solutions for the creation of Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) applications, electrical system protection applications and end-user applications.