Towards an architecture design for a future societal energy supply system
Korthout, N. (2017)
The electricity supply system in the Netherlands has already been operational for more than a century. Its architecture has stayed mostly the same throughout several of the last decades. Meanwhile, the context in which the system operates has changed dramatically. Today, systems oftentimes are designed with user- centered approaches to satisfy the user’s needs as much as possible. A societal system, like the electricity supply system, should in turn be designed with a society-centred approach to satisfy society’s needs as much as possible. This master graduation thesis deals with this topic.
This thesis contributes the following: (1) an analysis of whether the current electricity supply system satisfies the needs of society as much as possible;
(2) requirement specifications of a societal energy supply system; and (3) a feasibility analysis of a societal energy supply system from a high-level engineering perspective using the architecture synthesis process (Tekinerdogan, 2000).
We conclude that an architecture for a future societal energy supply system can be synthesised, but additional research activities are needed to deal with the remaining unresolved technical problems.
Korthout_MA_EEMCS.pdf