What does Platform Agnostic Mean to you?

We've been using the term "platform agnostic" forever. But are we entirely sure what "platform agnostic" means anymore?

Ask a web developer and they will invariably start hammering poeticly about hardware architecture, software frameworks, and programming languages. Ask a journalist and they will likely start talking about the places content is housed in print, on the web or in an app.

Chat with a film or television producer, writer, editor, marketer and they may casually throw out the term "transmedia," a close relative of platform agnosticism which is coming into its own as an industry. A few years back I attended a conference in San Francisco all about transmedia.

We like to think of Sparksheet as a platform agnostic magazine. Which means we're not married to any particular media outlet, and everyone loves the web, but at the same time, there is a time and place for Print, TV, Radio, and even podcasts. This also means our content is available on whatever screens or device we want to consume it on, thanks to website RWD (responsive web design).

Confused yet?

From an Electrical Engineer's view, what does Platform Agnostic mean to me?

VOLTTRON™. Its An Agent Execution Platform for the electric power platform system. It's Ever increasing numbers of sensors and controls are being deployed into the smart grid, but the infrastructure to exploit these resources is not keeping its place thanks to the big energy companies, and lack of support and funding.

VOLTTRON™ is a software agent execution platform that is designed to support distributed control for electric power grids, but it may also apply to other industries where large numbers of control points suggest a need for distributed control. VOLTTRON™ provides a means for deploying intelligent agents which can utilize multiple and diverse grid resources to perform decentralized cooperative decision making.

This system will allow energy customers, building owners, and utilities to realize better energy efficiency and reliability. VOLTTRON™ fills the need for an independent language-agnostic agent platform with built-in security and resource management.

It provides resource guarantees for agents in the platform, including memory and processor utilization, authentication and authorization services, directory services for agent and resource location, and agent mobility. Unlike most other agent platforms, VOLTTRON™ does not depend on a single agent authoring language. Instead, it was designed and implemented as a platform service and framework that is decoupled from the agent execution environment.

A prototype implementation of VOLTTRON™ has been written in Python (using Python v2.7.2) with executed agents written in Python and Java, and as shell scripts. The intended use of VOLTTRON™ is in the power distribution system for managing distributed generation, demand-response, and mainly plug-in electric vehicles.

Advantages

1. Lays the software platform groundwork for distributed operations and control of the electric power system.

2. Supports the distribution layer where end-customers are being served.

3. Designed and implemented as a platform service and framework that is decoupled from the agent execution environments.

This work was developed as part of the PNNL's "Future Power Grid Initiative," which will develop next-generation algorithms and tools for networking, modeling, simulation, visualization and decision support to drive the transfromation twards a more reliable and efficient future power grid.