Service-oriented Advanced Metering Infrastructure

for Smart Grids

Shudong Chen, Johan Lukkien

Liang Zhang

Department of Mathematics and Computer Science

Eindhoven University of Technology
Eindhoven, the Netherlands
{shudong.chen, j.j.lukkien}@tue.nl

East-China Power Dispatching Center

East-China Grid Group Company
Shanghai, China
zhang_liang@ec.sp.com.cn

AbstractAdvanced 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, we 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.
Keywords-Smart Grids,
Interfacing, Access Control.

I.

AMI,

Service-oriented,

Generic

INTRODUCTION

Smart grids advocate the participant of consumers in the

power business process including power generation,
transmission, distribution and consumption [1]. Through
collecting consumers motivation, their monitoring result on
delivered power quality, and feedback, power product
providers and operators can shape their market models
according to the real demand, dynamically distribute their
power transmission, achieve network optimization, and provide
high quality of service to their consumers. This requires smart
grids must a) provide new functionality that enables the
involvement of consumer, b) deal with the collaboration of
heterogeneous systems including smart sensors, smart meter
monitoring systems, various back-end power information
systems (distribution system, accounting and billing system,
etc.), c) guarantee the secure communication between
consumer and back-end systems and that among back-end
systems.

including Italy, Sweden and Finland, etc. However, by the

nature of distributed power transmission and distribution
environment, power information systems consist of
heterogeneous networks, performing communication using
different communication protocols. Even in the same network
there may exists heterogeneity between development
languages, deployment hardware and system structures
(database, I/O interface, etc). Moreover, they are tightly
coupled with the security distribution policy and horizontal
segregation of networks. Some of them are even running
individually. As a consequence, system interactions are rather
difficult. Increasing deeply system integration, seamless
communication, cost, and safety requirements of smart grids
reveals the need for a flexible, reliable, reusable, as well as
trustable architecture for AMI. Service-orient technology [3, 4]
provides a solution to solve system cooperation in a distributed
environment. Applications can be achieved through
coordinating and connecting independent functional entities
(services). Services expose well-defined interfaces to the
network and are defined independent of hardware platforms,
operating systems and programming languages. This makes it
possible to interact in a uniform and universal way between
services or systems. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a
service-oriented AMI. We envisage a smart grids system as an
environment in which functionalities are provided as scalable
services. Users, which include power providers, operators and
consumers, can simply interact with the system without
knowing how to access and control these services. The serviceoriented framework will support the interactions of services
provided by heterogeneous systems where issues including
security, cooperation, atomization, and dynamic adaptive will
be considered.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In
Section II we describe the service-oriented AMI for smart grids
followed with detailed design of the generic service interfacing
method A_ITF and working principle of the role-based access
control mechanism. In section III we analyze the feasibility of
our design together with a tooling support A_MAP. Finally we
summarize and conclude in Section IV.

In order to achieve these goals, Advanced Metering

Infrastructure (AMI) is proposed which uses two-way
communications, advanced sensors, and distributed computing
to improve the efficiency, reliability and safety of power
delivery and use [2]. AMI has been national widely deployed

978-1-4244-4813-5/10/$25.00 2010 IEEE

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II.

THE DESIGN OF A SERVICE-ORIENTED AMI

A. Service-oriented AMI
Different from the traditional power systems, a novel
feature of smart grids is using AMI to setup the connection of
power systems with their consumers. AMI grants consumers
with capability to support the intelligent running of power
systems. Customs can check the delivered power quality
through monitoring the smart meters installed along the power
transmission, distribution and user path. Under special
circumstances, for instance, disturbing or theft happen, they
can inform or be informed by the custom service center. They
can specify their requirement based on actual requirements and
available rate models. Moreover, their activities can be
collected for power operators to make new energy marketing

strategies. AMI also provides time stamped system information

for the back-end system analysis. For instance, through reading
smart meters, network performance will be monitored.
Subsequently, alarm, dynamic dispatching and work load
forecast can be achieved. Additionally, system self healing
functionality can also be provided.
Fig. 1 shows the service-oriented AMI design which
includes a custom portal (load management system) and some
example power systems. Functionalities of all the subsystems
are represented as services. We also wrap the modules of
existing power systems as services, for example, the smart
meter reading will be done by calling distributed meter reading
services running on smart meters.

Figure 1. Service-oriented advanced metering infrasture

Figure 2. Lifecycle of a business process in service-oriened advanced metering infrastrue

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B. Business process lifecycle in service-oriented AMI

In a smart grids system, a business process, which is also
called an application, is achieved through service coordination
and connection. A power operator wants to add a new function
to the smart grids system, for example, to let customers be
informed with new power products and according rating
model. To enable this, an orchestrator, on behalf of the
operator, will follow the steps, depicted in Fig. 2 to construct
such a business process then publish as an application in the
system for later use. The lifecycle of a business process
consists of the following phases:
1. Service development and deployment: a service provider
exposes a set of functions in the form of a generic service
to the network.
2. Service advertisement: when a new service is available, it
makes its presence known to other services on the
network. If there is a repository service, it sends out the
advertisement through e.g. broadcast or multicast.
Services who are interested in this repository record this
information and register themselves at this repository
next. If there is no repository available, services broadcast
themselves.
3. Realize an application: when there is a requirement of an
application, an orchestrator is going to achieve it through
service combination following the below steps.
3.1. service discovery: the orchestrator discovers
required services. It sends out service queries and
then receives a list of available services with
required functionalities.
3.2. service binding: the orchestrator informs specific
services to bind with each other in an order
according to the application logic. During this
process, the orchestrator checks the match between
services, e.g., the interfaces and the communication
protocols.
3.3. service invocation: this is the stage where a service
is connected and invoked after the application starts.
A service is called directly by another service.
Although control is still done by the orchestrator, as
shown in step3.4, the orchestrator is no longer
involved in service function invocation.
3.4. run time service management: during the application
execution, in order to guarantee the overall
performance, e.g., the throughput of a service and
robustness of the whole system, services are
monitored and managed about their availability and
resource usage.
4. Service unbind: after the application finishes, the
orchestrator orders services to disconnect from their
bound services, clean up whatever state needs to be
removed and relinquish the control which is implicitly
transferred upon binding.

C. A_ITF: generic service interfacing

Services provided by the load management system and
example power systems, for example, on demand ordering
service, demand response management service, are developed
and exposed in a generic way, A_ITF, to enable the
collaboration over a heterogeneous networking environment.
Different from the existing Web Services [5] and UPnP [6]
specifications, where services only contain interfaces which
express services capabilities, A_ITF defines that interfaces of a
service can be divided into two types: provided interface and
required interface. Capabilities of a service are expressed as
provided interfaces; capabilities a service needs for its work are
specified as required interfaces. Service compositions are
created by connecting (binding) these required and provided
interfaces. Special interfaces are used to program the extrafunctional aspects including security, management and
discovery, but also the mentioned binding. Separate
orchestrators are capable of searching services and connecting
them to form applications; the orchestrators can also expose
themselves again as services. In this way, applications can be
achieved by service collaboration. More importantly, services
have the ability to search for the functionalities they require
through the network. This can solve the problem that
application logic is encapsulated within services and
dramatically enhance the reusability of services and the
flexibility of the system [7].

Figure 3. Static view of A_ITF

All published methods of a service are added to the function

interface.
A_ITF is designed to support two service advertisement
mechanisms: the mediated way which is achieved through a
repository and the immediate way when there is no repository
available on the network. In an immediate discovery protocol,
a service broadcasts advertisements and queries while it
listens to messages of broadcasted advertisements and
queries. In case a service requires some interfaces from other

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services, it keeps a list of these services when it receives the

advertisement messages from them.

smart grids service in type of Web Service is supported. The

structure of A_MAP is depicted in Fig. 5.

A service can subscribe to the events generated by another

service. The EventGenerator provides methods to register and
unregister event listeners, as well as a method to inform all
registered event listeners of the occurrence of an event. The
EventListener interface provides a callback method that can be
called by an event generator once subscribed events occur.
The purpose of the binding interface is to bind a required
interface of a service to another service that provides that
matching function interface.
D. Role-based access control
In order to protect smart grids from malicious attack and
protect the privacy of consumers, smart grids services can be
added with security-related interfaces. Consequently, only
authenticated users can access them. Service discovery, access,
and collaboration all happen in a trustworthy environment.

Figure 4. A_ITF with security related interface

The security interface, illustrated in Fig.4, is used for

checking the identification and capability of a service user,
which can be fetched from a ticket, to access a smart grids
service. All activities including advertisement, discovery,
access and collaboration can only be executed with carrying a
valid ticket. Only authenticated users can access a service and
communication messages are encrypted. Due to the fact that
power systems are distributed, a single-sign-on mechanism is
supported by this security interface.
Different access actions are granted to different service
users according to their roles. For instance, a consumer has to
show his ticket signed by a trusted third party Certificate
Authorization (CA) and the system administrator can specify
which access actions are permitted to different roles. In this
way, each access to a service has to verify that it is authorized.
Moreover, all exchanged messages in smart grids are encrypted.
Asymmetric cryptography [8] is used for communication
secrecy. The cryptographic key pair for encryption and
decryption is distributed by the CA.
III.

IMPLEMENTATION AND ANALYSIS

To address the feasibility of this service-oriented AMI, we

have developed a tooling support, A_MAP, to wrap a
deployment platform independent A_ITF service into a
deployment platform specific service. Currently, to deploy a

Figure 5. A_MAP overview

Besides AMI, the proposed service-oriented design is

suitable for other modules in smart grids including ADO and
AIO. With the flexibility provided by the generic service
interfacing, real time simulation, distributed operation, network
optimization can be achieved with low-cost.
IV.

CONCLUSION

This paper presents a service-oriented AMI for smart grids

to solve the intercommunication problem of current power
systems. System functionalities are wrapped as scalable smart
grids services exposing generic interfaces defined by A_ITF. A
mapping tool, A_MAP, is developed to wrap a deployment
platform independent smart grids services as Web Services. It
supports the seamless interactions of heterogeneous systems
where issues including flexibility, reliability and security are
considered. With achieved seamless communication, this
service-oriented AMI can associate consumers with actual
system workload, furthermore support the intelligent running
of power systems and meanwhile providing a trust and secure
environment for smart grids.
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