Service-oriented advanced metering infrastructure for smart grids

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) enables smart grids to involve power consumers in the business process of power generation transmission, distribution and consumption. However, the participant of consumers challenges the current power systems with system integration and cooperation and security issues. In this paper, the authors introduce a service-oriented approach to AMI aiming at solving the intercommunication problem and meanwhile providing a trust and secure environment for smart grids. In this approach heterogeneous systems expose services to the network. System integration and cooperation are done through service composition. A generic service interfacing method is designed to develop standardized services for heterogeneous power systems. Moreover, role-based access control mechanism is used to guarantee the secure access to smart grids. With the seamless communication between consumers and power systems and among power systems themselves, this service-oriented AMI can associate consumers with actual system workload and furthermore support the intelligent running of power systems.