Architectural Issues

Following are seven important structural issues that System Architecture disciplines can help identify and avoid, which will otherwise negatively impact the System Security, Reliability and Economic Efficiency of decarbonising Power Systems:

  1. Tier/Layer Bypassing:  The creation of information flows or coordination signals that ‘leapfrog’ a vertical Tiers/Layers of the Power System’s operational hierarchy. 
  2. Coordination Gapping: An element of the Power System does not receive an explicit flow of coordination signals from any higher Tier/Layer of the system and therefore operates in isolation. 
  3. Hidden Coupling: Two or more Entities with partial views of the system state issue simultaneous but conflicting coordination signals to Distributed Energy Resources (DER) and/or other Components of the Power System.  
  4. Latency Cascading: Creation of compounding latencies in information flows due to the serial routing of data through various computational systems, processes and organisations.  
  5. Computational Time Walls: Where excessive data volumes, latencies and processing ‘bottlenecks’ occur, optimisation engines will hit a computational ‘time wall’ at some point where no amount of computing resource will be adequate to solve the optimisation problems in a reasonable time.   
  6. Cybersecurity Structural Vulnerabilities:  Structural choices result in communication and routings that create non-cyber vulnerabilities to system penetration.  
  7. Back-end Integration Constraints:  Multiple vertical silo structures found in many supply-chain organisations drive significant back-end integration costs, anti-resilience and are anti-extensible due to the coupling of applications in which where failure in one can ripple through to degrade others.

Given the fast-evolving nature of power system transformation, the Future Grid Accelerator (FGA) has the status of a perpetual BETA version. Your suggestions for how each concept and definition may be enhanced are very welcome.

All feedback will be reviewed and considered for inclusion in subsequent updates.

Please provide your suggestions to improve to this definition: