The project will consider the requirements, the high-level architecture, operational need, and business impact of developing a future control room simulated environment. The outputs will include an initial roadmap and architectural design for the future control room simulator, as well as outline a proposed programme of works for the simulator’s initial operational period. This NIA project will also make recommendations for future development, further work required, use cases and user requirements for the proposed simulator to assess its viability and ongoing benefits to the electricity industry.
Objectives
The project has the following key objectives:
Capture the requirements from a range of internal and external stakeholders for a future control room.
Identify a range of existing and new use cases, create a set of future scenarios and perform a first assessment on how today’s control room will need to adapt to be able to perform in these future scenarios.
Establish a preferred option, design, and requirements specification for a potential future control room simulator that will be used to simulate the requirements and future scenarios identified in objectives 1 & 2.
Capture the current and future functionalities and requirements of technology vendors and suppliers.
Demonstrate affordability and fundability of the preferred solution through the development of a robust financial business case.
Develop a roadmap for the facility with an associated short, medium and long-term innovation programme. This roadmap will extend beyond the build of a digital twin of the GB electricity network and will clearly highlight the critical path to enabling the DSO transition.
Learnings
Outcomes
The project performance is stated in section 4 of this report and detailed reports are available upon request. Below are the key outputs from the project, Figure 1 is the Use cases from the stakeholder workshops and Figure 2 is the roadmap for innovation for the future control room system. These have led to proposals for follow on work which will be discussed in Section 10. of this closedown report. The fact that demonstrator projects will follow this research project provides evidence that the project has achieved its planned TRL increase from TRL2 to TRL4.
Figure 1: Use Cases from the project workshop
Figure 2: Future Control System: Roadmap (draft subject to change)
Lessons Learnt
• The initial internal workshop sessions have highlighted the importance of comprehensive stakeholder engagement (with diverse job roles) to enrich the content of the project. Early engagement is key when trying to organise large recurring workshops.
• It is undesirable by Ofgem and the DNOs to fund a physical bespoke DNO network simulator facility. However, there is a desire to better simulate the network by control room staff. This should be done virtually within the existing DNO infrastructure to ensure maximum usefulness, ease of data transfer, and transferability between companies.
• A future project could progress the creation of an “intelligent control system” which would use AI based analysis and control for future distribution network management and system-wide conflict management to assist the control room and its staff. This will be particularly necessary as the quantity of data control engineers are expected to process and act upon dramatically increases.
• Another topic for future projects is secure, real time data exchange between control systems. At the moment getting third party data into the control room in real time is not possible but it will eventually be required to coordinate future growing flexibility markets, local communities and independent DSOs.
• Future advances in technology also need to consider the human role in the future control room, what that role should be and how they interact with highly automated systems deployed by future control rooms.
