Gossip protocol approach for a decentralized energy market with OPC UA client-server communication

Abstract

Gossiping is a well-researched protocol that enables decentralized information sharing. Being comparable to viruses spreading in a biological population, such concepts of data sharing are also called epidemic protocol. Without wanting to be impious with respect to recent pandemics, we propose its usage to facilitate a peer-to-peer (P2P) market for sharing energy between flexible loads or generation units, respectively. Gossip algorithms have been proposed several times in the context of power sharing in transmission grids. Our main contribution is the integration of such scenario with OPC UA. Comprising security by design, good interoperability attributes, several, well-maintained stack implementations and a widespread usage in automation, it reveals to be an outstanding framework for the proposed use case that will be explained in the first sections. After describing underlying physical models and the setup scenario, we will compare the results of the scenario that was conducted on non-OPC UA modules and an OPC UA implementation. Mostly, the performance is questioned at the comparison, still some beneficial concepts of OPC UA can be highlighted in the conclusion: Security controls can be added to the system at the Application Layer where Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) can be performed, which allows a fine granularity of privileges expressed for subjects (agents in the gossiping algorithms) and objects (energy related assets) via semi-formal security policies. Additionally, UA Discovery service allows for plug and play availability. Concluding, a framework for a very efficient large-area algorithm is presented here to be researched in further work.