Domain-specific power applications development environment and strategy: a model-driven approach to SCADA/EMS

Abstract

This thesis proposes a model-driven approach to develop applications that compose a suite known as Energy Management System (EMS). EMS is an essential tool for the operation of electrical systems, including hydroelectric power plants. Given the characteristics and complexity of each project, commercial “off-the-shelf” products might not fulfill all the requirements, demanding the development of customized versions or even entirely new applications for each customer. Managing the life cycle of such customized software becomes a complicated endeavor, particularly while performing upgrades, or migrating to a different vendor or product line. EMS software constitutes part of a cyber-physical system, for which sophisticated models are often constructed during the planning, designing, and operation of the installations. Such models, however, are usually employed only as support and documentation, while source code ends up being the main EMS software artifact throughout the development process. The evolution of such a system is expensive and error-prone, requiring manual changes to source code and the corresponding documentation. Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is an approach to system engineering in which models are used as primary artifacts, while programs (and other products) are automatically generated from such models. MDE approaches are applied in several industrial areas, for which specialized languages and tools support the modeling activities and the automatic transformation of such models into executable software. For SCADA/EMS software development, however, a dedicated approach is still absent. Therefore this thesis proposes D-SPADES: the Domain-Specific Power Applications Development Environment and Strategies, a Model-Driven Engineering approach tailored to the EMS domain. D-SPADES relies on a domain-specific modeling language based on block diagram notation, associated with mapping strategies and tools for automatically transforming models into source code for applications that can be integrated into existing SCADA platforms. D-SPADES have been applied to model and automatically generate source code for two real-world applications at the Itaipu Power Plant: a volt/var controller and a component for a system-wide special protection scheme. The new volt/var controller was thoroughly validated using a power system simulator, and compared to a legacy application, developed through traditional approaches. Its performance in terms of functionality, resource usage, and source code metrics is considered satisfactory. The special protection scheme, after successfully passing through a set of simulated and real system tests, was permanently deployed to the production system and is fully operational since 2022. Hence it has been demonstrated that D-SPADES is a viable approach to the development of mission-critical SCADA/EMS applications.