Testing Challenges and Approaches for DERMS Deployment

Distributed Energy Resources Management Systems (DERMS) are increasingly becoming a need for many utilities to manage DERs on their networks. DERMS deployment includes a variety of actors arranged in varying architectures, communicating with each other employing various protocols. With the complexity around DERMS deployment rigorous testing is required at various stages of the deployment to ensure correct functionality. This paper presents the various architectures for DERMS deployment, presents its testing requirements, and discusses the available methods and tools to meet the testing requirements. Finally, two case studies are presented where two different kinds of testbeds were used to meet the clients DERMS testing requirements.