GNode

A GNode is the fundamental building block of GridWorks. The G stands for grid.

Many of the lead roles in the Millinocket demo are GNodes: the SCADA, the TerminalAsset, the MarketMaker and the AtomicTNodes.

Copper GNodes

The electric grid can be reasonably well modeled as a graph, where an edge in the graph represent a copper wire and cable with relatively uniform electrical characteristics (mainly no sudden intentional change in voltage via a transformer) and the nodes in the graph represent places where two or more edges meet. Note that an electrical device attached to the electric grid can also usually meet the characteristics of an edge, where one endpoint is electrical ground.

Edison originally made a bunch of local DC powerplants, and transmit low-voltage DC to businesses and homes. This is what he made in New York City.

Tesla proposed an alternative system that involved alternating current (AC) generation and transformation. This allowed for high-voltage transmission.

Edison’s grid had generators everywhere, Tesla’s (which is what we have implemented) has substations and other transformers everywhere.

What this means is there is a natural hierarchy on our AC grid based on voltage.

We start out with a set of what we call Copper GNodes which represent a subset of the nodes in this copper graph. We then create a spanning tree that tracks the natural hierarchy of voltage on the grid. While the electric grid does have loops, it doesn’t actually have that many - put another way, the edges of this spanning tree capture most of the edges in the graph. We capture the remaining edges by turning them into additional GNodes with GNodeRole InterconnectionComponent.

g-node-tree

In SDK:

  • TODO: hyperlink to GNode dataclass inside the SDK Data Classes

  • TODO: hyperlink to GNodeGt inside the SDK Types

BaseGNodes

The Copper GNodes have the GNodeFactory as their global authority. The remaining GNodes have various GNodeRegistries as their global authority.

The GNodeFactory does not maintain or track information about the devices themselves - this is done in the GNodeRegistry.

This level of abstraction is implemented by creating BaseGNodes, which are the objects that the GNodeFactory authorizes and maintains, and creating GNodes, which are a small extension of BaseGNodes.

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