Search NASA⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “Interoperability”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 235 records · Page 13

RAMSeS: Rapid Analysis of Mission Software Systems

Over the past few decades, software has become ubiquitous as it has been integrated into nearly every aspect of society, including household appliances, consumer electronics, industrial control systems, public utilities, government operations, and military systems. Consequently, many critical national security questions can no longer be answered convincingly without understanding software, including its purpose, its capabilities, its flaws, its communication, or how it processes and stores data. As software continues to become larger, more complex, and more widespread, our ability to answer important mission questions and reason about software in a timely way is falling behind. Today, to achieve such understanding of third-party software, we rely predominantly on the ability of reverse engineering experts to manually answer each particular mission question for every software system of interest. This approach often requires heroic human effort that nevertheless fails to meet current mission needs and will never scale to meet future needs. The result is an emerging crisis: a massive and expanding gap between the national security need to answer mission questions about software and our ability to do so. Sandia National Laboratories has established the Rapid Analysis of Mission Software Systems (RAMSeS) effort, a collaborative long-term effort aimed at dramatically improving our nation’s ability to answer mission questions about third-party software by growing an ecosystem of tools that augment the human reverse engineer through automation, interoperability, and reuse. Focusing on static analysis of binary programs, we are attempting to identify reusable software analysis components that advance our ability to reason about software, to automate useful aspects of the software analysis process, and to integrate new methodologies and capabilities into a working ecosystem of tools and experts. We aim to integrate existing tools where possible, adapt tools when modest modifications will enable them to interoperate, and implement missing capability when necessary. Although we do hope to automate a growing set of analysis tasks, we will approach this goal incrementally by assisting the human in an ever-widening range of tasks.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

Cybersecurity Assessments on Emulated DER Communication Networks

An increasing number of public utility commissions are adopting Distributed Energy Resource (DER) interconnection standards which require photovoltaic (PV) inverters, energy storage systems, and other DER to include interoperable grid-support functionality. The recently updated national standard, IEEE 1547-2018, requires all DER to include a Sun Spec Modbus, IEEE 2030.5, or IEEE 1815 communication interface in order to provide local and bulk power system services. Those communication protocols and associated information models will ensure system interoperability for PV and storage systems, but these new utility-to-DER communication networks must be deployed with sufficient cybersecurity to protect the U.S. power system and other critical infrastructure reliant on dependable power. Unlike bulk generators, DER are commonly connected to grid operators via public internet channels. These DER networks are exposed to a large attack surface that may leverage sophisticated techniques and infrastructure developed on IT systems, including remote exploits and distributed attacks. Although DER make up a growing portion of the national generation mix, they have limited processing capabilities and do not typically support modern security features such as encryption or authentication. In this work, Sandia National Laboratories constructed simulated DER communication net- works with a range of security features in order to study the security posture of different communication approaches. The experimental test environment was created in a Sandia-developed co-simulation platform, called SCEPTRE, which emulated Sun Spec-compliant DER equipment, the utility DER management system, communication network, and distribution power system. Adversary-based assessments were conducted and a quantitative scoring criteria was applied to evaluate the resilience of various architectures against cyber attacks and to measure the systemic impact during such attacks. The team found that network segmentation, encryption, and moving target defense improved the security of these networks and would be recommended for utility, aggregator, and local DER networks.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Summer 2021 Internship Report

The Library Research and Prototyping team (Proto Team) under the research library explores aspects of scholarly communication, covering aspects of infrastructure, interoperability, and persistence. One of the key contributions of the team is the contribution in standardizing and forming the infrastructure for Mementos in web archiving. The Memento framework in web archiving enables access to digital resources in prior versions serving both persistence and the interoperability of the information. During the internship program, I worked on improving the Memento infrastructure by updating the memento validator. The Memento validator provides the functionality of testing the compliance of the web resources to the Memento specification. The application is intended to be used by the community at large such as web archives, researchers, librarians, and general users, with different levels of technical expertise.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗

Comprehensive Assessment of On-And Off-Board Vehicle-To-Grid Technology Performance and Impacts on Battery and the Grid

This project defined, developed, and tested the open standards-based requirements, engineering design and system integration of on and off-vehicle Vehicle-to-Grid technologies both on the grid and on the PEV, to assess their effectiveness in implementing the use cases that create value for the grid, which in turn, can be passed on to the ratepayers and the PEV owners. The project comprised of three key categories of work and four key sub-areas of work. The three key categories were: On-Vehicle V2G, Off-Vehicle V2G, and impact of V2G operation on the battery capacity degradation. The four key sub-areas of work under each of these categories were: defining requirements, implementing the technology, performing system integration testing, and estimating the value of each of the grid services under specific assumptions, on a per-vehicle and on an aggregated basis. The technical implementation demonstrated the validity of standards-based approach to grid integration that led to interoperability, in addition to assessing the operational details with grid constraints imposed at the transformer level. The technology implementation also identified the subtle gaps in the standards definition to close the feedback loop on the accuracy of the standards as written, which are being implemented as revisions to the appropriate protocols. The battery impacts assessment developed a test cycle that the batteries from a real PHEV were subjected to for both the mobility-only and mobility with V2G specific energy cycling. While the battery impact results show a clear incremental degradation in response to additional throughput for V2G application purposes, the amount of additional kWh that can be made available without exceeding the end-of-life capacity definition of the battery at its 10-year warranty period was found to be significant. Given that the PEV battery being exercised during testing was a PHEV battery (smaller energy capacity), and 44% of its usable energy (i.e., SOC) was utilized daily for V2G applications, the EVs with much larger batteries will fare much better, either in terms of extracting more value in terms of incremental kWh for V2G, or in terms of relative incremental degradation of the capacity through the battery lifespan. Further, this battery was the second-generation Lithium-Ion chemistry circa 2015, which is at least two generations ago. Continual improvements in electrochemistry and manufacturing techniques as well as on-board capacity will enable the future batteries to provide even more energy for non-mobility-related services. Finally, the valuation of V2G energy services at the premise, distribution, and the ISO/market level was carried out for both the on-vehicle and off-vehicle cases, to understand both the GHG mitigation and operational efficiency improvements in quantitative terms. The analysis indicates that between $\$400$ and $\$1400$ per year of total value to the grid can be realized. When netted of costs to implement V2G either on or off-vehicle, the net value is available to be shared between the ratepayers and the EV owners. Over the life of the EV, therefore, this value becomes significant and can easily provide both ratepayer and EV owner benefits more than the cost of the equipment, either on or off-board, in addition to providing GHG mitigation benefits both on the grid and on the mobility sides. For these benefits to accrue, the key learnings from both the on- and off-vehicle V2G parts of the project indicate the need for at-scale demonstrations through involvement of real EV owners to validate both the technical feasibility, interoperability, as well as real grid benefits by performing extensive data collection and analysis. This will help inform the grid planners, the program designs, and tariff designers, as well as automotive and equipment manufacturers how best to create their products to maximize grid, ratepayer, and EV owner value.

30 DIRECT ENERGY CONVERSION↗

DOE Laboratory Support for DER and Inverter-Based Resource Integration Standards (ACCEL II) (Final Report)

This report documents efforts under a project that followed work completed under Accelerating Systems Integration Standards (ACCEL). In this continuation, the project team provided support for updates to critical standards for interconnection and interoperability of distributed energy resources at the distribution level. In addition, the project contributed to development of guidance for operational best practices of the bulk power system with high levels of DERs. Additional goals of the project were to inform and develop improved recommended practices and certification standards for end-to-end interoperability of DERs, utilizing Sandia laboratory assets when needed.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Common Information Model for Electromagnetic Transients (CIM for EMT): CRADA 533 [Abstract only}

The control and protection functions of inverter-based resources (IBR) have raised concerns with bulk system reliability. Most of the current interest lies with solar photovoltaic generation but increasing amounts of storage would pose the same risks. Newer North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) guidelines call for electromagnetic transient (EMT) studies of IBR and recommend that transmission operators collect distributed energy resource (DER) data to support such modeling. IEEE Standard P2800.1 is defining tests for model parameterization, so good model data should become available from inverter vendors. (EMT studies also apply to large power transformer reliability, and transformer vendors can provide EMT models.) Utilities don’t currently have the rest of the bulk system represented for EMT studies at large scale. An International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standard Common Information Model (CIM) provides a way of supporting these detailed models from physical asset data, e.g., conductors, towers, transformer data sheets, control block diagrams, while avoiding software vendor lock-in. CIM-for-EMT, with proposed schema extensions and open-source converters, provides a way to exchange EMT data between organizations and tools. This project leverages Office of Electricity (OE) funding of CIM-for-EMT code base through the GridAPPS-DTM project, and of GridPACKTM (parallelized transmission solver), for interoperability testing in CIM-for-EMT. The project also leverages partner PGSTech investments in EMTP® interoperability with CIM.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Enhanced Control, Optimization, and Integration of Distributed Energy Applications (ECO-IDEA)

With support from the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) partnered with Xcel Energy, Schneider Electric, Varentec, and Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) to meet the goals of the Enabling Extreme Real-Time Grid Integration of Solar Energy (ENERGISE) program. This project developed and validated an innovative data-enhanced hierarchical control architecture that enables the efficient, reliable, resilient, and secure operation of future distribution systems with a high penetration of distributed energy resources like solar energy. The architecture enables a hybrid control approach where a centralized control layer is complemented by distributed control algorithms for solar inverters and autonomous control of grid edge devices. It is fully interoperable and includes all the cybersecurity aspects necessary for reliable and secure system operation. The hybrid approach can seamlessly integrate multiple voltage-regulation technologies, both at central and grid-edge levels, which enables reliable and efficient system operation in the face of unpredictable conditions. The overarching goal of the Eco-Idea project is to develop, validate, and deploy a unique and innovative Data-Enhanced Hierarchical Control (DEHC) architecture that comprehensively addresses the formidable challenges associated with proliferation of high penetration of distributed PV such as reverse power flows, transients from variability of PV systems, feeder load balancing, and voltage stability. These issues are exposing the weaknesses of existing grid operations and controls - including, but not limited to, lack of grid situational awareness, heuristic and slow-acting control actions, latency of control for emergency situations, and points of failure in communications. The proposed architecture will comprehensively resolve the deficiencies of current operational settings - where monitoring and control solutions proposed across industry and academia may not be interoperable and may not coexist in the same system - and will enable an efficient, reliable, resilient, and secure operation of future distribution systems with penetration of solar energy well beyond current limits. The DEHC architecture was developed and validated rigorously through hardware-in-loop simulations in the laboratory environment and deployed on the field.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Real Time and Forecasted DLR: Use Cases

This document contains two use cases for the utilization of dynamic line ratings in operational practices. These use cases were developed in support of the Transmission Optimization and Grid Enhancing Technology (TOGETS) task force aimed at facilitating the deployment of dynamic line rating and power flow technologies across the United States. The project included a demonstration of the technology on the Idaho National Laboratory system. The procurement documents, tests scripts, and field-validated results from multiple vendors will be published to improve industry’s familiarity with the products. Because of the urgency in performing this work and INL’s unique test setup, the Task Force identified a need for additional public information on the information exchanges required for operationalizing DLR (i.e. integrating DLR’s within actual system operations). As such, this use case document and an accompanying interoperability profile have been developed with input from the Task Force and various vendors whose systems would ultimately support the functionality described. The use case and interoperability profile support two distinct functionalities with different purposes.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Federated IRI Science Testbed (FIRST): A Concept Note

The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) vision for an Integrated Research Infrastructure (IRI) is to empower researchers to smoothly and securely meld the DOE’s world-class user facilities and research infrastructure in novel ways in order to radically accelerate discovery and innovation. Performant IRI arises through the continuous interoperability of research workflows with compute, storage, and networking infrastructure, fulfilling researchers’ quests to gain insight from observational and experimental data. Decades of successful research, pilot projects, and demonstrations point to the extraordinary promise of IRI but also indicate the intertwined technological, policy, and sociological hurdles it presents. Creating, developing, and stewarding the conditions for seamless interoperability of DOE research infrastructure, with clear value propositions to stakeholders to opt into an IRI ecosystem, will be the next big step. Governance, funding, and resource allocation are beyond the scope of this document: it seeks to provide a high-level view of potential benefits, focus areas, and the working groups whose formation would further define the testbed’s design, activities, and goals.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Batched Sparse Linear Algebra (Final Report for Subcontract B648960)

This report finalizes design specifications for developing batched kernels for small tensor operations for unassembled matrix-free iterative solvers, batched solvers for partially assembled operators, and batched solvers with support for various sparse formats. The outcome of the project milestones is a set of interfaces to Batched Sparse LA solvers running on hardware accelerators for use in ECP Libraries and Applications. It is part of the development of sparse batched kernels, solvers/preconditioners as well as creating interoperability in xSDK libraries with sparse and dense batched functions to benefit ECP applications. The participants included representatives from ECP libraries (not limited to the xSDK project), applications, and vendors (AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA). Batched sparse linear algebra solvers form the new frontier for algorithmic development and performance engineering. Many applications (ECP and non-ECP alike) require simultaneous solutions of small linear systems of equations that are structurally sparse. To move towards high hardware utilization, it is important to provide these applications with appropriate interfaces to efficient batched sparse solvers running on modern hardware accelerators. We present interface designs in use by HPC software libraries supporting batched sparse linear algebra and the development of sparse batched kernel codes for solvers and preconditioners. We also address the potential interoperability opportunities to keep the software portable between the major hardware accelerators from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA. The presented interface specifications includes batched band, sparse iterative, and sparse direct solvers. This report summarizes progress in Kokkos Kernels and the xSDK libraries MAGMA, Ginkgo, hypre, SUNDIALS, and SuperLU_dist.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Universal Input-Output Model of GFM Functions and Data-Driven Verification Methods

An overarching goal of the UNiversal Interoperability for grid-Forming Inverters (UNIFI) Consortium is to develop vendor agnostic specifications and guidelines that ensure interoperability of gridforming (GFM) inverter-based resources (IBRs) without requiring vendors or system operators to reveal proprietary information. These UNIFI principles and specifications are envisioned to apply to a wide range of technologies and systems. The initial work on the UNIFI principles and specifications has focused on performance requirements and high-level aspirational principles outlined in [1]. Going forward, a key question is how to translate such high-level requirements and principles into rigorous specifications that can be enforced and validated for a wide range of IBRs.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Workflows Community Summit 2024: Future Trends and Challenges in Scientific Workflows

The 2024 Workflows Community Summit report presents the outcomes of a three-day international gathering that brought together 109 experts from 18 countries to discuss future trends and challenges in scientific workflows. The summit focused on six key areas: time-sensitive workflows, convergence of AI and HPC workflows, multi-facility workflows, heterogeneous HPC environments, user experience and interfaces, and FAIR computational workflows. Discussions highlighted emerging challenges such as integrating AI with traditional HPC, managing workflows across diverse facilities, addressing heterogeneity in computing environments, and ensuring workflows are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). The report outlines recent advances, ongoing challenges, and provides recommendations for each topic area, emphasizing the need for standardization, improved interoperability, and the development of more sophisticated tools and frameworks to support the evolving landscape of scientific workflows in the era of exascale computing and AI integration.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Planning Roadmap for DER Integration in India: Industry Best Practices and Resource Guide

Ensuring safe, reliable, cost-effective DER integration at scale requires holistic planning, broad stakeholder engagement, and should address key development areas such as standards adoption, equipment testing and certification, interoperability and cybersecurity, interconnection procedures, and advanced forecasting and DER management. Each of these areas currently represent significant challenges for utilities, regulators, OEMs, developers, and even consumers worldwide. India has already seen significant growth of DERs and has announced targets for substantial growth yet to come, with the potential for DERs to make up a non-negligible portion of the country's overall generation capacity. As such, it is of critical importance that Indian stakeholders consider the potential impacts of wide-spread adoption of DERs and take preemptive action related to the five development areas listed here, among others. India should consider strategies including the adoption of key DER standards related to interconnection, testing, and cybersecurity; enabling effective and secure communication channels for DER interoperability; testing and certifying DER equipment in accredited testing laboratories; building robust, streamlined interconnection procedures; and revamping legacy system planning structures to incorporate DERs in a holistic planning framework.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

HPC-FAIR: A Framework Managing Data and AI Models for Analyzing and Optimizing Scientific Applications

The increasing reliance on machine learning (ML) to analyze and optimize large-scale scientific applications on supercomputers faces a significant bottleneck: the lack of readily available, high-quality training datasets and the difficulty in reusing existing AI models. This project was motivated by the urgent need to address the “FAIR” principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, Reusability) for both training datasets and AI models in the high-performance computing (HPC) domain. The project developed HPC-FAIR, a high-performance computing data management framework designed to centralize HPC-related datasets and AI models within a unified hub. To ensure interoperability, the framework established a standardized representation and vocabulary (ontology) for both data and models. HPC-FAIR also implemented automated workflows to streamline data processing, model access, and benchmarking. Additionally, the project focused on optimizing data harnessing efficiency through advanced techniques like deep reuse and compression-based analytics.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Enabling the Broader Use of MOOSE for Nuclear Energy and Other Simulation

This Final Scientific and Technical Report summarizes work performed under the Phase IIA SBIR project “Enabling the Broader Use of MOOSE for Nuclear Energy and Other Simulation” (DE-SC0020906) from August 2023 through August 2025. The objective of the Phase IIA effort was to mature and harden capabilities developed during Phase II, with the goal of enabling practical interoperability between Coreform’s isogeometric analysis (IGA) technologies and the Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE), while improving robustness, performance, and scalability for complex, nuclear-relevant geometries. Over the course of Phase IIA, the project established and validated an extraction-based interoperability pathway between Coreform tools and MOOSE. A combined mesh and matrix format was defined collaboratively with MOOSE developers and integrated into the solver, enabling standard MOOSE workflows to operate on data exported from Coreform’s IGA and Flex Representation Method (FRM) pipelines. Early demonstrations validated architectural compatibility using linear solid mechanics problems, while later efforts focused on benchmark testing and external use. By the end of the project period, engineers at BWXT were able to independently set up and execute a simulation using the Coreform–MOOSE workflow and provide direct feedback that informed further refinement. In parallel, substantial effort was devoted to improving the robustness of trimmed U-spline construction for complex CAD geometries. A growing test suite of nuclear-relevant models was compiled through collaboration with multiple stakeholders and used to drive extensive bug fixing and reliability improvements. These efforts resulted in improved robustness and performance, including the addition of fallback capabilities that enhance reliability when the underlying commercial CAD kernel fails. Performance-oriented work progressed later in the project, with the development and demonstration of methods to decompose complex geometries into structured subregions and updated data representations to support more efficient solver processing. Additionally, extensive enhancements to threadsafe parallel data structures and trimming operations established a foundation for scalable processing of large assemblies. Collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories on the SGM geometric modeling kernel advanced to a functioning interface test case, positioning the workflow for future kernel integration. Overall, the Phase IIA effort successfully transitioned the project from architectural proof-of-concept to externally exercised, solver-integrated capability, while clarifying remaining technical challenges related to standardization, performance optimization, and kernel integration.

42 ENGINEERING↗

PV Operations Software Transparency: A PVMAC Industry Snapshot

The rapid growth of photovoltaic (PV) deployment has increased reliance on software platforms for monitoring, workflow automation, diagnostics, and performance analytics. As these tools play a central role in asset management and operations and maintenance (O&M), greater transparency in methodologies, data handling, and validation practices benefits the broader PV ecosystem. To better understand current practices and identify opportunities for improved clarity and interoperability, 24 software providers contributed detailed responses through the PV O&M Analytics Collaborative (PVMAC) initiative, the first structured questionnaire of its kind in the industry, covering onboarding, interoperability, data quality, diagnostics, AI/ML, and other operational categories. These providers represent over 1.1 TW of solar assets under management. The analysis shows broad adoption of digital twins, AI/ML, and API integrations, but also highlights challenges in onboarding processes, inconsistent definitions and methodologies, variability in key performance indicator (KPI) calculations, and limited independent validation. Greater standardization, clearer documentation, and stronger validation frameworks could improve transparency, comparability, and trust across PV operations software platforms.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Toward Trustworthy Autonomous Science: A Two-Year Community Roadmap

One year ago, the AISLE roadmap argued that autonomous laboratories operated as isolated islands and proposed a grassroots network organized around five critical dimensions. The field has since moved faster than that roadmap anticipated: multi-agent systems have produced experimentally validated hypotheses, self-driving laboratories have grown more interoperable and orchestrated, reasoning-trained and domain foundation models have raised the capability ceiling, and the Genesis Mission has placed autonomous experimentation at the center of U.S. federal science strategy, with industry emerging as a primary actor. Progress has met a sobering counter-current, including a corrected flagship discovery result, benchmarks showing that agents which rival experts on closed-ended questions still complete only a fraction of open-ended research, and fabricated citations surfacing at leading venues. We read this as the defining tension of the field: producing a candidate discovery is no longer the hard part, but verifying it is, and this asymmetry now limits autonomous science more than raw model capability. Accordingly, we update the roadmap around seven dimensions, revisiting the original five and elevating two former cross-cutting concerns, trust, verification, and reproducibility, and safety, security, and governance, to first-class status. We assess the original milestones (M1 through M14) as achieved, partially achieved, reframed, or open, add four new milestones (M15 through M18) for the elevated dimensions, and scope the path forward to a two-year horizon, with the first year concentrating on interfaces, protocol adoption, and the scaffolding of verification, and the second targeting federation, zero-trust coordination, and governance. Throughout, we position the grassroots network as the interoperability fabric that lets national programs, international initiatives, and commercial platforms connect rather than re-silo.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

Universal Passive Synchronization Method for Grid-Forming Inverters Without Mode Transition

Power systems are transforming with increasing levels of inverter-based resources (IBRs). This transformation requires critical roles of grid-forming (GFM) inverters replacing synchronous generators for bulk power system stabilization and ancillary services, also allowing flexible power system operation, such as microgrid that is operated by multiple GFM IBRs to achieve system resilience against contingencies. To realize the resilient power systems allowing flexible in-and-out operation of GFM IBRs potentially programmed with different primary controls, a synchronization method universally applicable, i.e., independent of control types, would be beneficial to ease the integration process, but it has not been actively studied. To fill the gap, this paper proposes a universal synchronization method that achieves a passive synchronization to enable a smooth transition in a grid with off-nominal system parameters, i.e., voltage and frequency. The logic proposed requires no modification on the primary control, thus applicable to any type of GFMs with a voltage reference input. To validate the concept, a simulation of an IEEE 13-bus benchmark system modified with 3 GFM inverters is presented. It simulates an inverter-driven black start scenario in which GFM inverters autonomously turn on and connect to the grid under heavy loading, using the synchronization logic. The case study demonstrates that GFM inverters can tune their voltage reference to smoothly synchronize without severe transients, and contribute to a seamless black start of the grid under unbalanced load conditions. Two GFM methods - Droop and dispatchable virtual oscillator control - are used for the demo to validate feasibility and interoperability of the passive synchronization.

black start↗