Designing the control infrastructure of future “smart” electrical grids is a challenging task. Such grids will integrate a wide variety of producers and consumers that are unpredictable and operate at various scales. Smart grids will need to control these in order to attain global management objectives at the macro-level, while also taking into account local objectives and private interests at the micro-level. The long-term aim of this work is to identify and develop reusable paradigms, architectures and frameworks that help build self-adaptive and self-organising systems, of which smart grids are a particularly interesting case. We will discuss how modularisation and integration techniques help the design of self-adaptation and self-organisation, and how to capitalise on re-usable tools, such as integration design patterns, to solve control problems in the context of complex systems.
