Intent-based Network Management and Orchestration for Smart Distribution Grids

5G technology complements the enabling of communication services for different vertical industries such as smart distribution grids. Automation is an integral and necessary part of the power distribution grid operation and management. This paper postulates a framework by which the smart distribution grid can obtain service-oriented communication services using 5G network slicing and intent-based networking (IBN). IBN provides an interface to service users and network stakeholders to cooperate through a high level abstraction model of service provisioning in a network agnostic manner. The automation and adaptability of the distribution grid are facilitated by using the dynamic and closed-loop mechanism of IBN together with network slicing and network function virtualization for network management and orchestration. We identify the automation parts of the power distribution grid and illustrate the intent processing and its inclusion in the definition of network slice instances, service and network configuration models.