This article presents a framework for IoT architecture design considerations for Power & Energy Management systems. When designing a new system or modernizing an existing one, solution architects need to determine how to deploy functionality across the three tiers of an IOT architecture. There are some fundamental characteristics of each tier that need to be considered:
Designing an IOT architecture to deliver on a set of interdependent energy management objectives is a tough problem. The problem gets even tougher when we consider that markets & customer requirements will evolve & expand. Today’s customer might be focused on energy efficiency, but tomorrow, reliability & sustainability may be a concern. Further into the future, energy market participation could also become a major driver. The customer rightly expects a future-proof architecture – one that allows the system provider to say “Yes, we can do that” when the next use case appears.
The real challenge is to deliver an architecture that delivers the current use cases and enables the future ones, while fitting within cost constraints. One of the biggest mistakes we often see is a narrow focus on cost-reduction in a single tier which impacts costs in other tiers and limits the future-proof aspects of the architecture.
Let’s look at two examples to demonstrate this. In our first example, your customer asks you to provide a switchboard, including the ability to monitor breaker status and internal temperature. There are a few architectures that can deliver this solution. A typical design is to feed the device data to an on-premises Building Management System (BMS) or Electrical Power Management System (EPMS). Another approach is to provide the same features through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) architecture, with a gateway that connects to a cloud platform. Using the table above as a guide, we can see that the on-premises solution will meet the customer’s immediate needs, but will be inadequate if any of these scenarios occur later:
- The customer wants to extend the solution to other sites
- The customer wants to add energy monitoring and provide access to a corporate energy manager who work in a different region or country
- The customer wants to experiment with 3rd-party analytics & machine learning algorithms to understand if they can optimize energy usage
- The customer wants to allocate energy costs to downstream departments with regular reporting vs. targets
- The customer wants to explore the implications of becoming a prosumer in a local energy market
Cloud-based IoT platforms are generally designed for this type of scope expansion. Either with built-in capabilities to meet these needs or with plug-and-play APIs that allow data to be easily transferred to other cloud services that provide the capabilities. With a cloud-connected gateway, access to these new functions can be as simple as updating a subscription rather than quoting for new engineering and capital costs. From this example, it should be clear that architectural decisions across the IoT tiers can greatly impact the future-proof characteristics of any energy management solution.
In this article, we’ve presented a framework that describes the technical characteristics of IoT tiers so that solution architects can understand the implications of design choices for Power & Energy Management Systems. This framework can be helpful as a tool to structure discussions of architectural trade-offs with customers and partners. Future articles will explore these topics in more detail.