Providing the Key Ingredients of an Edge PaaS for Supporting and Facilitating the Development of Smart Energy Applications

Abstract

The monitoring and control of Critical Energy Infrastructure (CEI) is nowadays entrusted to Smart Grids (SGs). SGs rely on massive data and services to provide “awareness” about the status of the system. To do that distributed computing schemes have been applied based on decentralized communications, data collection, extractions, loading and analysis. These schemas are totally aligned with the Edge Computing (EC) paradigm. EC is an emerging paradigm that provides capabilities for processing and analyzing data away from the cloud, at the edge of the network closer to the source of the data. It offers multiple benefits including improved application performance, network latency reduction, and data locality. These characteristics reinforce EC is expected to have great impact on SG. However, a crucial aspect in implementing EC is company’s foundational technology to really progress in cyber, digital, and cloud moves for SGs. The authors strongly believe that the foundation for the successful implementation of cloud/edge-based solutions strictly depends on employing new core architectures based on modern advanced cloud-native solutions, i.e., patterns, tools, techniques, and technologies derived from cloud-based designCaparica. As a result of this statement an Edge Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has been designed, developed, and deployed and used as the foundation of a flexible data platform at the Edge made up of fast-deployable, open source, and free-to-use PaaS services.