Functional model of Virtual Power Plant (VPP)

Abstract

Economical and environmental concerns push towards solutions for sustainable energy supply. The Smartgrid has emerged as a promising response to tackle these challenges. Nevertheless, such large scale complex system must handle tremendous computational and communicational requirements which require adoption of proper solutions (e.g. distributed computing). The Virtual Power Plant (VPP) is considered as a module/cluster inside Smartgrid to aggregate heterogeneous renewable resources into a 'virtual' entity that is seen by the rest of the grid as a single component in terms of technical and commercial characteristics. Unfortunately there is still a gap between conceptual solutions and technical realization of VPP. The functionalities of VPP are logically encapsulated in Commercial VPP (CVPP) and Technical VPP concept (TVPP). We focus in this work on ICT structure of VPP which is mostly mapped to TVPP. As a complex and heterogeneous system, VPP involves stakeholders and experts coming from different fields. In order to facilitate communication among them and to better collect, understand and organize user requirements a system level model is necessary. Due to heterogeneity, but mostly the fact that VPP includes both hardware and software, SysML emerges as the most natural solution. That way, as it is already a good engineering practice in software development, a full model driven design of a system can be achieved. This means: organizing user requirements, making use case diagrams, activity diagrams, class diagrams and finally making a proper HW/SW code. TVPP is used as a case study to demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed approach.