The introduction of Smart Meter Gateways (SMGWs) to buildings and households creates new opportunities and challenges for energy management systems. While SMGWs provide interfaces for accessing recorded information and enable communication to external parties, they also restrict data access to protect the privacy of inhabitants and facility owners. This paper presents an analysis of options for integrating automated (Building) Energy Management Systems (EMSs) into the smart meter architecture based on the technical guidelines for SMGWs by the German Federal Office for Information Security (“Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik”, BSI). It shows that there are multiple ways for integrating automated EMSs into the German smart metering architecture, although each option comes with its own advantages and restrictions. By providing a detailed discussion of trade-offs, this paper supports EMS designers that will be confronted with differing freedoms and limitations depending on the integration option.

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The German Smart Meter Gateway (SMGW) infrastructure enables digital access to metering data and distributed energy resources by external parties. There are, however, various restrictions in order to guarantee the privacy of consumers, and strong security requirements. Furthermore, in the current state of development, there are still several challenges to overcome in order to implement demand side management (DSM) measures. In this paper, we present a prototype enabling DSM measures within the SMGW infrastructure, using the smart grid traffic light concept. The prototype implements an automated decentralized energy management system (EMS) that optimally controls an electric vehicle charging station. In the development of this prototype, we did not only evaluate five of the seven available SMGW devices, but also push the limits of the infrastructure itself. The experiments demonstrated the successful implementation of the intended DSM measure by the EMS. Even though there are technical guidelines standardizing the functionality of SMGWs, our evaluation shows that there are substantial differences between the individual SMGW devices.

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This note aims at supporting research on Building Energy Management (BEM), which addresses the active optimization of energy consumption patterns of buildings. For the practical evaluation of BEM algorithms, communication with devices in the building is required. Therefore, it is common to set up a Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), i.e. a software that is able to interact with the devices, but also provides a unified interface for external components like optimization algorithms. However, implementing HAL applications often causes a significant effort using state of the art software, especially if the encountered devices make it necessary to develop custom software components to establish communication. In this paper we present the BEMCom framework as an alternative. BEMCom leverages a service oriented architecture (SOA) which enables the creation of applications with minimal effort by simple combination of services. This also allows the efficient development of new services that can reuse arbitrary existing software components. Furthermore, the SOA approach makes the created HAL applications easy to comprehend and supports stable operation. Alongside this paper, we release our implementation of BEMCom as open source, providing extensive documentation and ready-to-use services for the efficient creation of HALs.