Design and Development of a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) with Open Source Tools for the Processing of Data Monitored in a Set of Photovoltaic (PV) Plants

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper presents an important issue and the proposed solution seems to be useful. In my opinion some changes may improve your work.

·         In introduction there are some paragraphs where is discussed the operation of this tool something that could be presented in section 2. I propose to compare the disadvantages of other approaches with advantages of your approach in order to stress your novelty.

·         In table 1 are presented real entities that are included in RDBMS. Information for number of strings per inverter and modules per string are available or a general PV layout?

·         In line 482 is referred the importance of date and time. There is concern about local time of data something that may creates problems in comparison of PV systems with different time zone.

·         In table 8 “Number of inverters (KW)” KW may be referred one line above.

·         Detection of possible faults is based on graphical comparisons and Pearson correlation index? There are examples of calculated parameters as efficiency or PR?

Author Response

The authors would like to thank the reviewer for his revision of the paper, for his comments and his suggestions for improvement of the manuscript. The reviewer's comments are answered in the attached file (Response_to_Reviewer_1), responding to proposed questions and indicating the changes that have been made to the paper following the reviewer's suggestions. Changes made to the paper have been marked in the document, so that these changes can be easily seen.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper discusses the use of a RDBMS for photovoltaic plants, with the aim to collect the data deriving also from many photovoltaic plants in a structured way.

 

This topic is interesting because the O&M companies of the photovoltaic field often manage a lot of PV plants; therefore, a structured data organization is a plus, because it allows optimizing time.

 

The originality of the paper is due over all to the use of an open access tool; in fact, several big companies already offer RDBMS, but software is covered by copyright and customizations are not available.

 

The paper add the possibility to customize the RDBMS even after its realization, because based on open source tools.

 

The paper is well written, but some parts are difficult to read, because they are too long. I suggest putting some descriptions in graphical form or in flow-chart; this helps reader.

Author Response

The authors would like to thank the reviewer for his revision of the paper, for his comments and suggestions for improvement of the manuscript. The reviewer's comments are answered in the attached file (Response_to_Reviewer_2), responding to proposed questions and indicating the changes that have been made to the paper following the reviewer's suggestions. Changes made to the paper have been marked in the document, so that these changes can be easily seen.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx