Nodal Asset Management: From Raw Data to Decisions
This article was originally featured in Smart Energy International in September 25.
Nodal Asset Management (NAM) is a comprehensive edge-to-cloud solution for monitoring, control and advanced analytics that turns heterogeneous data into shared, actionable knowledge.
Distribution networks are being asked to do more than ever: accommodate variable renewables, electrify heat and transport, orchestrate flexible demand and withstand more frequent disturbances.
Meeting these expectations is no longer a hardware-only challenge. The decisive shift is to treat the grid as a software platform – where real-time intelligence, interoperability and autonomous decision-making are first-class capabilities.
Inside the Enoda PRIME® Exchanger, the NAM layer provides that platform. Its purpose is simple: deliver the situational awareness that distribution operators and autonomous agents need to act early, act locally and act safely.
From raw data to shared meaning
Most distribution systems, if they are instrumented, will collect data for offline, mono‑platform analysis. That limits the scope and speed of coordinated actions. NAM replaces this with a layered, semantic pipeline:
Acquisition and normalisation at the edge unify telemetry from diverse devices and protocols.
Contextualisation aligns time, topology, location, asset health, weather, market signals and work orders.
Semantic abstraction expresses observations as machine-readable concepts and relationships, enabling domain independent exchange between services.
Knowledge representation persists expert rules and patterns inferred from data – supporting contextual, temporal and behavioural awareness.
By progressively abstracting away from raw signals, NAM makes information discoverable and reusable across agents, sites, and applications – without locking it to any single vendor or domain.
Service-oriented autonomy at the edge
NAM hosts embedded, service-oriented agents that collaborate across the distribution of Prime Exchangers and with other third-party devices and feeders. Because agents consume semantically rich information, they operate independently yet interoperate seamlessly.
They evaluate conditions in real time and coordinate actions such as:
Condition-based operations that fuse sensor trends and expert knowledge to anticipate failures and reduce truck rolls.
Fault location, isolation and service restoration (FLISR) with faster, more accurate switching proposals.
Congestion and voltage management that blends DER schedules, storage dispatch and demand flexibility.
Hosting capacity maximisation through predictive situational awareness and constraint-aware setpoints.
Crucially, the same information model serves both human operators and autonomous agents, strengthening trust, auditability and cyber resilience.
Two engines of insight: expert and inferred knowledge
Reliable autonomy demands higher-order information. NAM blends:
Domain knowledge captured from subject matter experts - for example, protection schemes, operating policies, asset constraints.
Inferred knowledge learned from processed sensor data - including but not limited to, state estimates, anomaly detection, forecasted loads and DER output.
Both are stored, accessed and shared efficiently so deliberative agents can act while devices remain in operation. This enables adaptive behaviour that reflects local context and evolving system conditions.
Operational benefits for distribution networks
By elevating situational awareness and enabling coordinated autonomy, NAM delivers tangible improvements:
Speed: earlier detection and mitigation of abnormal conditions reduce outage minutes and operational risk.
Capacity: better visibility and control unlock additional DER hosting without excessive reinforcement.
Efficiency: shared semantics eliminate one-off data integrations, cutting engineering effort and opex.
Flexibility: domain-independent services can be recomposed quickly to meet new regulatory or market needs.
Assurance: consistent models and histories improve explainability, compliance and incident forensics.
Redefining the grid’s capabilities
Software is redefining the distribution network from a collection of devices into a coordinated, knowledge-driven system. Within every Prime Exchanger, NAM supplies the semantic interoperability, independence of operation and real-time intelligence that autonomous platforms require.
The result is a grid that is more observant, more adaptive and more secure – strengthening energy security by enabling faster local detection, isolation and restoration, and by reducing reliance on manual interventions.
At the same time, NAM’s fine-grained situational awareness, especially at the LV edge, unlocks higher penetrations of distributed renewables: rooftop solar, community storage and other behind-the-meter assets can be hosted safely and actively coordinated without breaching thermal, voltage or protection constraints – accelerating decarbonisation while keeping the system stable.