Experience Report: First Steps towards a Microservice Architecture for Virtual Power Plants in the Energy Sector

Abstract

Virtual Power Plants provide energy sector stakeholders a useful abstraction for distributed energy resources by aggregating them. Software systems enabling this are critical infrastructure and must handle a fast-growing number of distributed energy resources. Modern architecture such as Microservice architecture can therefore be a good choice for dealing with such scalable systems where changing market and regulation requirements are part of every day business. In this report, we outline first experiences gained during the change from the existing Virtual Power Plant software monolith to Microservice architecture. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Software and its engineering → Software design engineering; Hardware → Smart grid