Abstracted Architecture for Smart Grid Privacy Analysis

Electricity companies have traditionally seen customers only as consumers but with the introduction of new metering technology the situation is about to change. As customer participation increases with the development of the Smart Grid environment, new concerns about privacy arise. In this article we introduce an architecture offering a clear, information-centered bird's-eye overview to the Smart Grid environment for privacy analysis purposes. To do this, we first seek out commonalities in the environment by dividing the topic into smaller elements in order to gain deeper understanding and to form abstract and functional models. From these we form a reference architecture representing a real-world situation. Our approach permits identification of the use of private information in the environment without implementation-dependent issues. We also present the privacy issues related to the architecture. The implementation strategies can vary, and we conclude with a discussion of the effects of the varying approaches.