NOAH Project: an Example of Application

Abstract

A NOAH demonstrator is planned in the IAM Pilot based at ENEL Ricerca’s premises in Milan. The IAM Pilot is the result of ESPRIT projects funded by the European Commission, and is a cooperative action of ENEL with the User support Groups for automation based on CENELEC EN50170. It is a permanent platform used to investigate research results, standards and market offerings for distributed automation. The paper describes how the IAM-Pilot laboratory, already equipped with EN50170-compliant instrumentation, has been upgraded to implement an example of the NOAH architecture. This experimental site is intended to enable us to bring together some key concepts of the NOAH project (which are explained in the other papers presented at this Conference) and will permit us to show, concretely, how main NOAH concepts may be brought to bear to obtain the expected results. The paper recalls the IAM-Pilot structure and investigation approach and describes the general demonstration scenarios developed for NOAH. Particular attention is paid to the practical aspects of the possible use of the NOAH concepts and to verification of the real benefits end users and system integrators can derive from the Noah approach. Another key expected result from a real practical investigation is the possibility of checking the key aspects of the NOAH specifications in order to submit verified specifications to CENELEC with a view to drawing up a suitable standard.