The electrical energy supply is facing major changes, triggered on the generation side by the increasing integration of decentralised and above all renewable energies - especially those with fluctuating feed-in - and on the consumption side by the possible and necessary control of consumption systems, as photovoltaic and wind energy systems in particular feed their power into the grids depending on meteorological influences, which usually does not correlate with the load profiles or consumption processes. Shifting the operating cycles of individual consumers and appliances to such regenerative oversupply situations is only one way to compensate for this imbalance.

Future intelligent energy supply systems, so-called "smart grids", will be characterised by an increasing number of active components that monitor the consumption and generation of electrical energy and coordinate them with each other during operation. Starting with the digital electricity meter in the household, through decentralised generators and controllable consumers to forecasting and monitoring systems: "smart", IT-supported, standard-compliant and fully networked components everywhere will exchange standardised information with each other and independently coordinate and optimise their processes.

As the number of active components and players in smart grids increases, so does the complexity of the overall system to be optimised. Operational optimisation, which could previously be integrated and carried out centrally, is becoming increasingly difficult and is already no longer manageable during operation in many areas. Self-organisation in natural distributed systems should serve here as a model for decentralised energy management, in which autonomous software agents coordinate with each other and in this way achieve optimum operation of the overall system.

The increasing number of decentralised generators inevitably requires a higher number of active protection and control technology components, both on the system side and within the existing grid infrastructure, in order to guarantee the necessary protection and control functions for security of supply in the grids. On the one hand, reliable detection and timely reaction to faults of varying degrees of urgency (short circuits, supply instabilities, etc.) are necessary. On the other hand, continuous reconfiguration of the installed protection systems to current supply configurations is required in order to avoid false tripping due to unforeseeable situations.