Date of Graduation

5-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

Degree Level

Undergraduate

Department

Computer Science and Computer Engineering

Advisor/Mentor

Dr. Chris Farnell

Committee Member

Dr. Chris Farnell

Second Committee Member

Dr. Alexander Nelson

Third Committee Member

Dr. Qinghua Li

Abstract

As current electrical grids trend toward a heavier reliance on DERs, there is a growing need to secure DER communications while maintaining data sovereignty for device owners. Previously, work by Donna Thakadipuram established the foundation for a decentralized framework using Solid by implementing a prototype that used a Raspberry Pi and a DSP to simulate Modbus traffic and upload the data to a Solid server. This thesis extends her work to simulate multiple DERs using Typhoon HIL and communicate to each device over DNP3/TCP. The system uses a Python-based DNP3 master to collect telemetry from all 12 DERs before transforming said telemetry to be enriched with semantic context that translates each data point into a human- and agent-usable format that does not rely on the user knowing the configuration of each DNP3 outstation. In addition, each device is provisioned to have a personal Solid Pod with proper WAC. Through WAC, the user can decide which other users have read and write access to resources within the Solid Pod. In the case of this work, each device gives permission to a stand-in utility pod that is able to read data and send on/off commands to each device. This approach demonstrates that DNP3 data can be decentralized while preserving device-level data ownership.

Keywords

DNP3; Distributed Energy Resources; Operational Technology

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