Event-Driven SOA Based District Heating Service System with Complex Event Processing Capability

Introduction

Energy consumption for heating purposes has attracted more and more attentions from governments, heat-supply enterprises and individual users. Therefore, the informatization and intelligent management of district heating industry has become increasingly important. However, with the management refinement of heating supply, the district heating system is gradually evolving from a simple remote-monitoring system to a large-scale complex composite service system, which collaboratively achieves the goal of automatic monitoring and intelligent management. The new metering-enabled district heating system deploys a large number of meters or sensors in the boiler, heat exchanger and subscriber household to accurately measure the operating status of the heating network as shown in Figure 1. Differently from the traditional heating system, the new metering-enabled district heating system can use various smart meters to accurately measure the amount of heat generated by the boiler and the heat consumed by customers. Through these meters deployed in the boiler, heat exchanger, heat pipes and subscriber household, the district heating system can automatically or semi-automatically adjust the heating policy to dynamically meet the users’ heating requirements. For example, the system can automatically make effective adjustment of the heating energy depending on the outside air temperature and consumer needs. This new system strengthens the refined management of heating and realizes the energy conservation. It can easily support the consumption-based billing rather than the heating space-based billing for households. With the refinement of heating supply, the information system becomes more and more complex. The monitoring data is not only used for the heating monitoring and control system, but also needed by other enterprise information systems like maintenance system, data analysis system, accounting system and customer management system. For example, customers can query the real-time heating state of their household and the total heat energy consumed per day or month by the web portal of customer management system anytime and anywhere. Customers even can remotely control the temperature adjustment of their households. The accounting system uses the metering data to generate the customer bill. When the customers report their radiators are not hot, the seating staff of call center or maintenance staff can also query the real-time heat metering data related to this customer. When the maintenance personnel find that the household is out of credit from the accounting system, they have the right to provide maintenance services after payment. In addition, as a social public service, the government administration sectors like district heating offices also need to monitor and guarantee the entire city’s heating to achieve the lowest heating standard. Therefore, it can be seen that the new metering-enabled district heating system has evolved from a simple remote-monitoring and controlling system to a large-scale complex composite service system, which often involves the processing of complex multi-source real-time data streaming and realizes the event-driven service dynamic coordination cross multiple service domains or even organizations.

Figure 1.

New district heating system