This project is released on behalf of Energinet, the Danish transmission system operator for electricity and gas, by Energinets Digitalization department as a call to action to solve the problem as defined below.

Project goal:
Digitalizing the energy grid is a monumental task and requires focus on software development.
The current method is to work with multiple standard bodies, and later assign industry partners to implement hardware and software following these standards. This method can take multiple decades, which leaves the energy grid behind as software development evolves. It is extremely costly, which results in a large cost overhead that is passed on to citizens. This project seeks to create the non-existing knowledge and software technology needed to change the current situation to a software-first method, where multi-stakeholder developed open-source software sets the de facto standard. In the area of grid components, gateways are needed that homogenize the otherwise heterogeneous environment involving a multitude of standards, hardware, and software components. With a software-first method, software will be created to help streamline the current and future energy grid deployment architecture. However, this knowledge and software should not only benefit a small part of the industry but help alleviate the structural costs in the entire industry. The project aims to create collaboration between multiple international partners to evolve the software to ensure wide applicability. The results of this project will be distributed as open source software, that can benefit all stakeholders. Success criteria which this project includes: (1) Creation of an open source gateway to homogenize the grid infrastructure in a multi-stakeholder consortium. The gateway should expose the open standard IEC 61850, and an openly developed agile standard that can adapt to the quickly changing technology needs of the future. (2) Creation of a software stack that enable the gateway to fit small as well as large-scale deployments to fit all grid deployment and maintenance scenarios.
Value:
The energy system is built on legacy. This is a testament to the value of long term efforts of generating value in society by hundreds of years of infrastructure development. In more ways than we can imagine this is to be considered a great value, but can also be a cumbersome and costly hindrance to change.
 
Change is easy to accommodate when only few things will have to be adapted. In the case of the Danish energy transition, having what is widely acknowledged to be the worlds best operating power grid, can in itself be a hindrance if we do not design to adapt to the new paradigm of the green energy transition.
 
One such hindrance is connecting legacy systems and aging infrastructure to modern SCADA, automation and decision support systems. Another such hindrance is opening up towards using new technologies and de facto standards e.g. incorporating IoT into the more rigid, power specific standards and integrations practices. In fact, the adoption of the newest available technology is expected to be able to generate cost savings and efficiency in the order of hundreds of millions DKK per year, just for Energinet, if only we could bridge the gap between new IT technological advances and our aging equipment, which will continue to be in operation for many years to come.
 
The development of an open source, secure IEC 61850 gateway for automated communication between among others SCADA systems and substations is believed to be a central component in bridging this gap. 

State of the art:
The targeted open source gateway design can benefit greatly from IoT technology and concepts. Multiple IoT middleware platforms exist that solve several problems related to managing large scale IoT deployments and homogenizing the different implementations. For example, in the buildings space, so called Building Operating Systems (BOS), are a prevalent solution for solving this homogenization, such as BOSS [1], XBOS [2], Building Depot [3], Voltron [4], and several others [5-8]. Common for most of these are the direct or indirect implementation of a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), to homogenize the access to the hardware itself.

Unfortunately, a HAL only solves part of the problem, as sensor streams still need to be found or queried for based on their context in the underlying hardware structure, such as “Room 32A”, “Temperature Sensor”, or “Celsius”. To solve these problems metadata stores have been explored such as Metafier [9], and the query implementation in sMAP [6]. Later exploration found these representations of data was not expressive enough to capture the complex context of the IoT based sensor technology. Therefore, several RDF[10] based technologies were introduced to solve this problem. Notable used ontologies include Haystack[11], Brick[12], MASON[13], SAL[14], SSN[15], SOSA[16] and OEO[17]. Some of these are extremely generalized, while others focus on specific domains such as services (SAL), buildings (Brick), or the energy domain (OEO). Currently, no ontologies exist to describe the energy providers IoT hardware’s context to enable semantic querying of the underlying infrastructure.

However, once a stream has been located through the use of the metadata or ontologies, a different problem presents itself in the form of communication specifications for specifically two layers; transport and data format. For the transport layer several solutions exist [8, 18, 19], but when it comes to the format itself, the specification space is extremely diverse, and makes it difficult to integrate the different formats. Common for the standards are the fact that they were developed in standards bodies, and are complex to implement, which means they are typically outsourced to larger hardware vendors such as Siemens and others for production, but with a significant premium added. A directive from the European Union obligates the priority of ISO[20]/IEC[21]/ITU-T[22] (CEN/CENELEC/ETSI) before any other open-source de facto standard. IEC 61850[23] is one such standard, which is open, but implemented in proprietary hardware. EIC 61850 builds upon the foundation of already well known and established standards like x509 certificate infrastructure [24] to ensure trust and accountability. Creating a framework for an open-source IEC 61850 Gateway, that can also support other standards, will narrow the gap between the IoT world and the utility sector, and will fast track security and legacy technologies. Also, it will allow TSOs to tackle an immense technical dept accumulated over decades, by allowing 40-year-old equipment to adhere to modern standards.

Energy companies need to be able to deploy the middleware in multiple settings, from low resource edge computers, to modern large-scale cloud-based solutions such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon, or even privately-owned clusters. Existing technologies exist to facilitate easy deployment of software packages, that also takes care of dependencies, such as Docker [25]. These are lightweight packages that utilize the existing Linux kernel to make packages small and effective. Once these installations need to scale, orchestration software becomes necessary. Here Docker Swarm[26], and Kubernetes[27] are common software solutions. Both of these operate best at scale when containers are specifically built for scaling. Therefore, an initiative was formed to make software Cloud Native[28], and make sure that software was built in a scalable manner. Finally, this resulted in the vendor neutral Cloud Native Computing Foundation (https://www.cncf.io). While some of the underlying technology exists to enable the scalable deployments of a gateway, no project has provided a complete solution handling the special requirements for the grid domain.

[1]	S. Dawson-haggerty et al., "BOSS: building operating system services," Proceedings of the 10th USENIX conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, pp. 1-15, 2013.
[2]	 G. Fierro and D. E. Culler, "Xbos: An extensible building operating system," in Proceedings of the 2nd ACM International Conference on Embedded Systems for Energy-Efficient Built Environments, 2015, pp. 119-120. 
[3]	 T. Weng, A. Nwokafor, and Y. Agarwal, "Buildingdepot 2.0: An integrated management system for building analysis and control," 2013, pp. 1-8. 
[4]	 B. Akyol, J. Haack, B. Carpenter, S. Ciraci, M. Vlachopoulou, and C. Tews, "Volttron: An agent execution platform for the electric power system," 2012. 
[5]	A. Rowe et al., "Sensor Andrew: Large-scale campus-wide sensing and actuation," IBM Journal of Research and Development, vol. 55, no. 1.2, pp. 1-6, 2011.
[6]	S. Dawson-Haggerty, X. Jiang, G. Tolle, J. Ortiz, and D. Culler, "sMAP: a simple measurement and actuation profile for physical information," Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems, pp. 197-210, 2010, doi: 10.1145/1869983.1870003.
[7]	 J. Hviid, A. Johansen, F. C. Sangogboye, and M. B. Kjærgaard, "Enabling auto-configuring building services: The road to affordable portable applications for smart grid integration," in Proceedings of the Tenth ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems, 2019, pp. 68-77. 
[8]	 M. P. Anderson, J. Kolb, K. Chen, D. E. Culler, R. Katz, and M. Andersen, "Democratizing Authority in the Built Environment," 2017. 
[9]	 E. Holmegaard, A. Johansen, and M. B. Kjærgaard, "Metafier - a Tool for Annotating and Structuring Building Metadata," 2017. [Online]. Available: http://www.forskningsdatabasen.dk/en/catalog/2391247568. [Online]. Available: http://www.forskningsdatabasen.dk/en/catalog/2391247568
[10]	G. Klyne and J. J. Carroll, "Resource Description Framework (RDF): Concepts and Abstract Syntax," W3C Recommendation, vol. 10, no. October, pp. 1--20, 2004. [Online]. Available: http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-rdf-concepts-20040210/.
[11]	 D. Huynh, D. R. Karger, D. Quan, and others, "Haystack: A Platform for Creating, Organizing and Visualizing Information Using RDF," 2002, vol. 52. 
[12]	B. Balaji et al., "Brick : Metadata schema for portable smart building applications," Applied Energy, 2018, doi: 10.1016/J.APENERGY.2018.02.091.
[13]	 S. Lemaignan, A. Siadat, J.-Y. Dantan, and A. Semenenko, "MASON: A proposal for an ontology of manufacturing domain," in IEEE Workshop on Distributed Intelligent Systems: Collective Intelligence and Its Applications (DIS'06), 2006: IEEE, pp. 195-200. 
[14]	 J. Hviid and M. B. Kjærgaard, "Service Abstraction Layer for Building Operating Systems: Enabling portable applications and improving system resilience," Aalborg, Denmark, 2018/10// 2018, pp. 1-6, doi: 10.1109/SmartGridComm.2018.8587543. 
[15]	M. Compton et al., "The SSN ontology of the W3C semantic sensor network incubator group," Journal of Web Semantics, vol. 17, pp. 25-32, 2012.
[16]	K. Janowicz, A. Haller, S. J. Cox, D. Le Phuoc, and M. Lefrançois, "SOSA: A lightweight ontology for sensors, observations, samples, and actuators," Journal of Web Semantics, vol. 56, pp. 1-10, 2019.
[17]	O. E. Family, "Open Energy Ontology (OEO)," 2020. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/OpenEnergyPlatform/ontology/.
[18]	K. M. M. Thein, "Apache kafka: Next generation distributed messaging system," International Journal of Scientific Engineering and Technology Research, vol. 3, no. 47, pp. 9478-9483, 2014.
[19]	R. A. Light, "Mosquitto: server and client implementation of the MQTT protocol," Journal of Open Source Software, vol. 2, no. 13, p. 265, 2017.
[20]	ISO, "ISO Standards," 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.iso.org/standards.html.
[21]	I. E. C. (IEC), "International Standards and Conformity Assessment for all electrical, electronic and related technologies," 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.iec.ch.
[22]	ITU-T, "ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector," 2020. [Online]. Available: https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/Pages/default.aspx.
[23]	 R. E. Mackiewicz, "Overview of IEC 61850 and Benefits," in 2006 IEEE Power Engineering Society General Meeting, 2006: IEEE, p. 8 pp. 
[24]	R. Housley, W. Ford, W. Polk, and D. Solo, "Internet X. 509 public key infrastructure certificate and CRL profile," RFC 2459, January, 1999. 
[25]	A. Mouat, Using Docker: Developing and deploying software with containers. " O'Reilly Media, Inc.", 2015.
[26]	F. Soppelsa and C. Kaewkasi, Native Docker Clustering with Swarm. Packt Publishing Ltd, 2016.
[27]	K. Hightower, B. Burns, and J. Beda, Kubernetes: up and running: dive into the future of infrastructure. " O'Reilly Media, Inc.", 2017.
[28]	 E. A. Brewer, "Kubernetes and the path to cloud native," in Proceedings of the sixth ACM symposium on cloud computing, 2015, pp. 167-167. 

Project description:
Technical dept [1] as a concept reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy (limited) solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer. Consequences from this type of dept include costlier solutions, and potentially a crimpled IT infrastructure which is difficult or even impossible to maintain and modernize. The energy industry has accumulated an immense technical debt over the years, not because of taking an easy or limited route, but because of the slow rollout of standards to new hardware, and that projects take too long to implement. This has left installations up to 40 years old in production. Unfortunately, updating the installation with proprietary hardware is a costly, difficult, and not often a feasible choice. Effectively this development has made it difficult to innovate and modernize the installations to accommodate the green transition. The green transition is heavily supported by data analysis methods for prediction and optimization, which the current infrastructure cannot fully support. To alleviate this technical debt, instead we propose this project, which is to create the knowledge needed to develop and deploy an operation critical open source gateway. This gateway will allow TSOs and companies to integrate legacy infrastructure into modern deployments, which in turn will enable greatly improved data analysis and operations. The knowledge and software produced in this project will not only benefit a small part of the industry but will be made available as an open source project with documentation, together with a community supporting it. The project aims to create collaboration between multiple international partners to evolve the software to ensure wide applicability.

The sectors aging infrastructure stems from a deeper problem in the structure they operate under, which relates to standards. EIC 61850 [2] stacks and protocol converters are technologies which for startups and software vendors are very inaccessible or at least hard to come by. IEC 61850 is often related to projects where the vendors have a considerable market share in a highly specialised domain which carries and drives expensive development cost. At times, these specialised domains can be considered closed and proprietary, but since IEC 61850 is an open standard, this can seem to be counter intuitive. Furthermore, these characteristics constrain startups and open source communities. The European Union supply directive obligates the priority of the ISO[3]/IEC[4]/ITU-T[5] (CEN/CENELEC/ETSI) before any other open-source de facto standard. This directive can, at time appear counterproductive compared to the fast-moving world of IoT. Several of these new technologies do not follow the aforementioned doctrine. Creating a framework for an open-source IEC 61850 Gateway is addressing these constraints and additionally narrowing the gap between the IoT world and the utility sector. Effectively, an open-source gateway could fast track the entire sector in regard to securing and including legacy technologies.

Hypotheses
As covered in the state-of-the-art chapter, there are several gaps in knowledge and technology needed to create an open source gateway supporting the complex requirements of the energy sector, e.g., deployment scenarios and use cases. As this PhD covers both the topic of open source collaboration and the software development of the gateway the PhD aims to target two main hypotheses:
Hypothesis A: Open source collaboration on mission critical software can accelerate the development of and improve software products on shared interest in the energy sector.

For example, we assume that open source collaboration will enable a much higher degree of collaboration on software for mission critical systems and components within the power industry. Open source collaborative frameworks such as Linux Foundation Energy is assumed to ensure an improved framework of collaboration and will in itself accelerate the amount and quality of high performing, scalable, secure code, with little to no lock for the power industry. In particular the project will in WP 1 try to answer the research question: How can we design open source software for grid infrastructure elements? In WP 4 the project will answer the research question: How can we establish an optimal open source collaboration framework for development of open source software for grid infrastructure elements?

Hypothesis B: An open source gateway and associated software technologies will: 1) enable communication between IEC 61850 specific devices and other devices operating on de-facto standards (E.g. IOT devices); 2) increase the interoperability between control centers and substations; 3) reduce the technical dept of TSOs; and 4) enable interoperability on resource restricted hardware, that also scale to modern cloud native orchestration implementations.

For example, it is assumed that creating a framework for an open-source gateway will remove or reduce a multitude of constraints compared to the current framework and additionally narrow the gap between the IoT world and the utility sector. Which would mean an open-source gateway would open a fast-track for interoperability of legacy technologies, thereby greatly reducing technical dept, by bringing aging devices up to modern day standards. In particular WP 2 will try to answer the research question: What is the optimal architecture and key components of a multi-standard and protocol gateway, which need to support future extensibility from third parties? In WP 3 the project will answer the research question: How can a cloud native implementation of a gateway be deployed on hardware restricted devices, but also scale to large scale container-based orchestrators?

Tangible project deliveries:
·	An open sourced code base for the gateway
·	Documentation on adapting the gateway implementation to fit given needs in energy companies
·	Technologies, documentation and published research on deployment strategies supported by cloud native container-based orchestrators

Project work packages (WP):
WP1 – A software first method to develop open source software for the energy grid
This work package concentrates on utilizing and applying an approach for open source distributed agile development. Task 1 establishes the software infrastructure and workflows needed for distributed collaboration and quality control. Task 2 will gather functional and non-functional requirements and make them available for comment and review to the project partners over multiple iterations. Task 3 focuses on the standards that need to be homogenized to support a multitude of contexts to support depending systems. Partners perspectives will be included in this process using an agile approach. Milestone 1: Requirements and open source infrastructure.
WP2 – Open-Source development for a software gateway for grid components
This work package concerns itself with the open source development of software gateway. Task 1 will construct a fitting software architecture and technology decisions. Task 2 concerns itself with the homogenization of a heterogeneous standards environment. Representation of data, context, and extendibility will be considered. Task 3 develops the initial prototype of the gateway including a limited deployment, which is utilized for gathering practical experience. Task 4 matures the prototype over 10+ iterations of one month each. Theis will be achieved by exploring deployment scenarios (see WP3). Partners contribute at least one of the following: code base, use cases, and deployment candidate scenarios, deployment test cases. Milestone 2 & 4: The open source gateway and Scalable Deployments.
WP3 – Software technologies for scalable deployment
WP3 will ensure the gateway will support multiple deployment contexts, such as data centers or edge devices. Task 1 will ensure the gateway can be deployed on hardware restricted edge devices and cloud native container orchestrators alike so it can grow to thousands of streams if needed. Task 1 explores the non-functional requirements from WP1, and its impact on the use cases. Task 2 identifies deployment candidate scenarios and deployment technologies, as well as candidate placements in the currently running mission critical systems within the participating companies. Task 3 will deploy multiple test cases, to evaluate the maturity of the deployment strategies, to ensure coverage of deployment scenarios, and to inform the future roadmap for the gateway. Milestone 2 & 4: Open Source Gateway and Scalable Deployments
WP4 – Creation and maintenance of Open-Source community and knowledge dissemination 
This work package will ensure the creation and maintenance of an open source community to support the gateway software, and the dissemination of the project results. Task 1 creates an online open-source community. Task 2 will further cultivate this community with participating parties, to inform energy companies and others on how to participate in the initiative. Multiple parties are expected to contribute to the codebase and should be active members of the community. Milestone 3: Community creation, documentation and information site.