LF Energy Open Source Projects: SOGNO
Guest: Antonello Monti
Organization: RWTH Aachen University
Show: LF Energy Open Source Projects
SOGNO (Service-based Open-source Grid automation platform for Network Operation of the future) is a former European Union initiative which is now hosted at the Linux Foundation. In this series on LF Energy Open Source Projects, we sat down with Antonello Monti, Professor at the RWTH Aachen University, to learn more about the project.
The project started out being funded within the Horizon 2020 Project – European Commission, which are projects where industries and universities work together on developing what is called research and innovation action. These projects evolve from a basic development to university level to industry-level projects. As for the SOGNO project, it targeted the need for distribution grid operators to have a new platform for grid automation. This has become necessary in the European Union because in the past the level of automation was limited. According to Monti, “That’s where the need for a modular platform became quite clear.”
But what exactly is a service-based, grid automation platform? Monti explains it like so: “If you take the automation, there are several functions that may be needed for the grid operator. And depending on the grid operator, you may have a different selection of those functions. One example of this function can be state estimation and each of those services or these functions are organized from a software perspective as microservices that are integrated into a common database. This common database can be created with different solutions, for example, using MQTT or using Kafka. But the idea is this modern, microservices-based concept in which different services access the same database.”
SOGNO was open source from the beginning, so they only had to streamline their licensing to be certain that all components were coherent from a licensing perspective, which is very important to the Linux Foundation. Originally, the SOGNO community only included the original European projects. Since falling under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation, the community now includes partners from America and Canada. Joining the Linux Foundation also gave SOGNO a much more global perspective, which also increased the possibility of having global standard solutions.
Another important point, brought up by Monti, is that this move also allows them to continue to feed the platform with other projects. To that, Monti says, “I’m coordinating another European project called Platone (PLATform for Operation of distribution NEtworks) which is using the SOGNO platform.” He adds, “Some of the new components that are part of the work in Platone would be integrated into the LFEnergy project in the future. So there are different ways to feed the open-source platform, thanks to other funding also coming from other sources.”
As to expanding the community, Monti makes it clear SOGNO is growing with other organizations getting involved, such as RSA (a research institution in Italy), the University of Alberta, and other major vendors that are a part of the Linux Foundation.
When talking about the future of SOGNO, Monti mentions Ericsson, a major provider of 5G technology. He says, “One idea is the platform could be run in the base stations, so on the edge or in the cloud, directly embedded in the 5G network. Under that vision, the Telecom operator could be the one physically owning the platform and providing the platform as a service to a grid operator. So there are two business models that we envisioned, one in which the grid operator keeps complete ownership of the platform and the second one in which the grid operator works in close cooperation with a Telecom operator and the Telecom operator provides the IT infrastructure and the software on top.”
by TFiR
linux foundation
