Plug-in driven architecture for renewable energy generation monitoring

This paper is about the benefits of a plug-in based software architecture, but it is not only intended for programmers. It also stands the fact that monitoring is needed in any renewable energy generation plant and describes a way to fulfill this need. The fast evolution of renewable energy sources during the last decades resulted in the installation of many power systems all over the world, showing a sharp trend towards Distributed Resources (DR). There are many people related to them (because they use, own, operate, maintain or receive services from DR) who may be interested in knowing things about them for several reasons like production, maintenance, investigation, profitability, etc.; that is why data-acquisition systems are widely used in renewable energy source applications. These systems allow to collect and analyze data regarding the renewable energy installation performance as well as meteorological data. The basic idea on this paper is to achieve monitoring of different energy generation plants using a plug-in driven design technique, presenting as a result of an extensible software architecture design. The main difference between this paper and the previous work is that we focus specifically on monitoring as a necessity, proposing a generic and extensible software system, which could be employed to monitor any kind of renewable energy plant and extended to connect to new developed devices by changing small pieces of software. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.