Designing a laboratory setup for experimenting with smart metering for smart grid applications: technical challenges

Smart grids aim at improving the operation, monitoring, and control of the electricity networks. The massive rollout of smart meters and advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) leverages these applications in the low-voltage grid. AMI-based smart grids technologies must be carefully designed and tested before they may be deployed in the field, which requires appropriate methods and tools. Software simulations, although very useful at the early design stage, are not sufficient at the testing and validation stages: they may eventually fail to capture important features of the physical system under consideration. This creates a requirement for a hardware validation platform that represents the cyber-physical nature of an LV grid. In this study, the authors will discuss the technical challenges one faces during the implementation of such a heterogeneous system where the interactions between the components of the different subsystems become crucial and can no longer be avoided. The choices for some components will be restricted by their effect on other subsystems and therefore it becomes hard to satisfy the requirements of all of them.