You are on page 1of 4

A cloud-based architecture for Big-Data Analytics in Smart Grid: A Proposal

M.Mayilvaganan1, M.Sabitha2
1, 2
Department of Computer Science, P.S.G College of Arts and Science, Coimbatore, India.
mayilvaganan.psg@gmail.com,sabithamuthusamy.psg@gmail.com

energy, Wind Energy, Nuclear power, Wind power,


Abstract - A Smart Grid is an enhanced version of Thermal Power etc.
electric grid in which the demand and supply are balanced Figure 1 represents the basic structure of a Smart
to meet the customers need. The paper deals with the Grid.
formation of a cloud-based Smart Grid for analyzing the
Bid-Data and taking decisions to balance the demand of
customer needs. The proposed formation of smart grid will Thermal
deal with Big Data set which will contain the data regarding Solar
Power
the power usage patterns of customers, historic weather data Energy
of the location, the current demand and supply details. The
grid will operate on the data being fetched from the cloud
storage. The paper also focuses on smart grid being framed Wind
with the renewable energy sources. Smart
Power
Nuclear Grid
Keywords Smart Grid, Renewable Energy, Cloud Power
Computing, Hadoop, Big Data Analytics, Cassandra, Hive

Domestic
Industry Use
I. INTRODUCTION
Use
The Smart Grid is formed as a combination of
altering currents in which the production of electricity
from the renewable energy sources are considered and
analyzed whether if the supply will meet the demand and Figure 1: Basic Structure of a Smart Grid
alternate decision to be taken by the Smart Grid in
meeting the demand. The need for generation of A Smart Grid takes its source of generation from
electricity is growing worldwide and it has greater impact various power generation resources like both renewable
towards the industrial development of a country [1]. The and non-renewable. The renewable resource includes
growths in databases are also tremendously increasing as solar energy, wind energy, hydraulic power etc where as
the historic data are helpful in the future analysis and can the non-renewable energy resources include conventional
be taken as a factor for decision making. The historic power systems such as nuclear power, fossil fuel etc. The
weather data are stored in the cloud using the service usage and implementation of Smart grids is high that most
Cassandra database and Hadoop File System is used to of the countries shows interest in the inclusion of smart
retrieve the needed data during the time of estimation of grids in their infrastructure. A Smart Grid in turn consists
the need by the Smart Grid. The query language used to of Micro Grids which will be separate modules to produce
query the Cassandra database is the Hive Query Language energy from renewable energy sources and non-renewable
also known as HiveQL. The paper aims in giving a energy sources.
proposal to form a cloud-based Smart Grid which will act An example to be considered here is the Puducherry
as an intelligent system to maintain the balance between Smart Grid Pilot Project. The project is implemented by
the demand and the supply. the Government of Puducherry, India and Power Grid
Corporation of India Limited. The project is being
II. SMART GRID implemented with the objectives [3] of having a common
sharable platform, help the consumers reduce their
The Smart Grid is formed by integrating the use of electricity bills, user friendly interface and balance the
information technology, automation, telecommunications demand/supply chain.
and electric network control. The electric network control The Smart Grid is a major thrust area in which several
in turn involves the sensors, smart meters and deployment ongoing researches are done. Many countries have started
of control strategies and real-time data processing [2]. The implementing the Smart Grid to add to their existing
Smart Grid involves all the operations of a system such as power grid to increase the production of electricity.
generation, transmission and distribution. The Smart Grid Especially the European countries and United States have
combines all the power generation resources such as solar large number of projects implemented using smart grids.

978-1-4799-1597-2/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE


2013 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Computing Research

III. BIG DATA ANALYTICS the mapping of blocks to the Data Nodes. The above
architecture gives an idea about the working of the
The Big Data Analytics is a field which deals with Hadoop Distributed Files System.
data which are high in volume, velocity and variety.
When the data to be analyzed is high in volume (i.e in B. Cassandra
Petabyte, Exabyte or Brontobyte), the velocity is high and Cassandra is an open source distribution DBMS
the variety is also present then the usage of Big Data which was designed The Cassandra database is used to
analytics becomes mandatory. Big Data Analytics store large data sets. The Cassandra also support cloud
comprises of distributed file systems framework such as infrastructure making it to suit for our smart grid
Hadoop, Mahout, a multi- user database to handle huge implementation. Cassandra is in use at Netflix, eBay,
amount of data such as Cassandra, MongoDB, HBase and Twitter, Reddit etc. Cassandra has a proven history of
a query language namely HiveQL. These software are reliability as it does not have a single point of failure. As
open source in nature from Apache Foundation. the CAP Theorem also known as Brewers Theorem
The big data analytics can be used in our smart grids states no distributed computing system can have all of
to store the temperature history of a place, user demands, three values Consistency, Availability and Partitioning
production data etc. The data can be stored in cloud Tolerance [5]. Cassandra takes the two values Availability
environment and processing can be done. and Partitioning Tolerance. The Cassandra database can
be used in our smart grid to store the temperature data,
A. Hadoop user demand and supply.

The Apache Hadoop is a framework which helps in C. Hive


distributed processing of large data sets. Hadoop can be
scaled up from one server to thousands of machines with Apache Hive data warehouse software is used to
local computation. The Apache Hadoop Library is query large datasets which are stored in distributed
designed in such a way to handle failures and provide environment. Hive uses a simple SQL-like query
reliable service to the customers. Hadoop uses the concept language called QL to query the databases. MapReduce
of MapReduce. The MapReduce framework consists of concept can also be implemented with Hive. Hive consists
single master and one slave node per cluster. of two components namely Hcatalog and WebHcat.
Hcatalog is a table which allows the users to easily write
data on the grid. WebHcat provides a service to run
Hadoop MapReduce, Pig, and Hive using a HTTP
Name Node Metadata interface [6].

IV. FORMATION OF A SMART GRID


Client Block ops
The traditional electric grid can be replaced with
Read a smart grid. A smart grid consist of sensors, actuators,
smart meters, distributed management system, decision
Data Nodes Replication Data Nodes support system etc [7]. The smart grid formation is done
Blocks by identifying the different resources of power generation
such as solar energy, wind energy, fossil fuel etc.

Rack 1 Write Rack 2


Wind Solar
Turbines Panels
Client Nuclear
Power
Figure 2: Hadoop Distributed File System Architecture
Smart Grid
The Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) [4]
follows master/slave architecture. A HDFS cluster
consists of a Name Node and a master server that Transmitter
supervises the file system namespace. A Data node is
present to manage the storage in the cluster. In HDFS a
file is split into one or more blocks. These blocks are in
turn stored in the Data Nodes. The Name Node handles Domestic Use Industry
the namespace operations such as opening, closing and
renaming directories. The Name Node also takes care of
Figure 3: A Smart Grid
2013 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Computing Research

The traditional electric grid can be transformed by The storage/transfer of the generated power to be
placing a smart grid which is bidirectional that it balances done efficiently.
the load between the consumer and the producer. Smart
Grid is of high usage when it comes to the efficient usage A cloud-based smart grid [11],[12] will use the micro
of power. Smart meters are fixed in the smart grid to grids to compute the task of storing the historic weather
monitor the consumer requirements and measure the data and its architecture will contain a node storing the
resource produced. The load balancing is done by the weather data and the smart meters working on the
smart grid by transferring the load from low demand grid demand-response system to access the data to take
to high demand grid. The production and storage of power decision.
is monitored by the smart grid to enable/disable the
production depending upon the demand. Industries Domestic Power
The user can also calculate the usage requirements usage Resources
and switch between the peak hours to regular hours for
power requirements. The smart homes are helpful for the
consumers to keep track of their monthly usage and cut Solar
down their monthly electric bills.

V. A CLOUD-BASED ARCHITECTURE Wind

The smart grid consists of components such as smart Nuclear


meters, sensors, decision support systems etc to achieve Power
the goal of making the conventional electric grid to
behave smart. The cloud based architecture discussed in
the paper will contain the inclusion of big data analytics
to analyze the historic data, the consumer usage history SMART GRID
and predict the production of power from various HDFS Cloud Environment
resources.
A cloud computing has various different definitions [8],
Consumer
the one such definition is [9] Behavior
Pattern
Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous,
convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of
configurable computing resources that can be rapidly
provisioned and released with minimal management effort Nodes
or service provider interaction Supply Demand
The cloud computing environment provides various Rack 2
services models such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS),
Network as a Service (NaaS), Platform as a Service Rack 1
(PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). There are
different kinds of cloud deployments such as private Historic
Weather
cloud, public cloud, community cloud, hybrid cloud, Data
distributed cloud etc [10]. A cloud- based architecture can
be used with the big data analytics in the smart grid to Cassandra DB
efficiently balance the load in power production and
supply. The advantages of the three technologies viz.,
smart grid, big data analytics and cloud computing are Figure 4: An improved smart grid architecture
pooled together to produce an improved version of smart
grid to perform the following functionalities, The above proposed architecture consists of a smart
grid in which the other mandatory electronic components
Analyze the historic weather data and predict the are available and apart from it the HDFS is included. The
energy production. architecture consists of database such as historic weather
Analyze the consumer behavior (power usage) data, consumer behavior pattern, supply and demand
patterns to predict the demand in advance. details. Each time the system predicts the demand and
Keep track of the energy production from various calculates the supply based on the historic weather data
sources and take decision of switching between and consumer behavior patterns. The data are stored in
the high/low priority demands. cloud based Cassandra Database. To manage the storage
Balance the load with the demand/supply chain. and retrieval of the data the system uses the Hadoop
Distributed File System. The HDFS takes care of
2013 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Computing Research

distributing the storage to nodes in racks. The processing [9] Mell, Peter, and Timothy Grance. "The NIST definition of
is done using the Map/Reduce concept. The smart grid in cloud computing (draft)." NIST special
the proposed architecture uses a prediction algorithm to publication 800.145, September 2011.
predict the demand and supply. The system uses a [10] Knorr, Eric, and Galen Gruman. "What cloud computing
really means."Infoworld, April 2008.
distributed environment in which the energy resources [11] Simmhan, Yogesh, et al. "An informatics approach to
(renewable and non-renewable) are distributed; the demand response optimization in smart grids." NATURAL
consumers such as home, industries are also in a GAS , Vol. 31, pp. 60, 2011.
distributed environment. The proposed architecture of [12] Simmhan, Yogesh, et al. "On using cloud platforms in
implementing big data analytics will be suitable for the software architecture for smart energy grids." IEEE Int.
smart grid environment. Conference on Cloud Computing (CloudCom). 2010.

VI. CONCLUSION

In this paper, we have dealt with the efficient


planning of power production and distribution. The
implementation and usage of smart grids have increased
now days. The paper has suggested architecture to
implement big data analytics and cloud architecture in the
smart grids to make them even better. The proposed
architecture is a proposal and the implementation of the
smart grid is in process.

FUTURE WORK

The future work deals with the implementation of the


architecture with few connected smart grids and storing
the weather data in cloud based databases and using the
big data analytics to calculate the user demand and
supply.

REFERENCES

[1] Mayilvahanan, M., and M. Sabitha. "Opportunities and


Challenges in using Renewable Resources in India: A Data
Mining Approach." Int. J. of Emerging Trends and
Technology in Computer Science, Vol 1, no. 2, August
2012.
[2] Yu, Xinghuo, et al. "The new frontier of smart
grids." Industrial Electronics Magazine, IEEE Vol. 5, No. 3
, pp. 49-63, 2011.
[3] Puducherry Smart Grid Pilot Project, [online] Available:
https://apps.powergridindia.com/smartgrid/Default.as
px
[4] Apache Foundation Hadoop HDFS Architecture, Available:
http://hadoop.apache.org/docs/stable/hdfs_design.htm
[5] Apache Cassandra Tutorial, [online] Available:
http://cassandra.apache.org/
[6] Apache Hive Tutorial, [online] Available:
http://hive.apache.org/
[7] Farhangi, Hassan, "The path of the smart grid," Power and
Energy Magazine, IEEE Vol. 8, No.1, pp. 18-28, 2010.
[8] Geelan, Jeremy. "Twenty-one experts define cloud
computing." Cloud Computing J. Vol. 2, pp 1-5, 2009.

You might also like