The operating system 3228, in conjunction with the system BIOS 3224 and associated device drivers, provides the basic interface between the computer's hardware and software resources, the user, and program modules/components/engines. A user may enter commands and information into the computer 3202 through a keyboard 3216 and/or an input pointing device (i.e., mouse) 3218. These and other input devices are connected to the processor 3204 via serial port interface 3212 and a system bus 3208. A monitor 3214 or other type of display device can be connected to the system bus 3208 via a video adapter 3206.
As discussed above, the computer 3202 can operate in a networked environment using network connections 114 to one or more remote computing devices. The remote computing devices can be a server (e.g., power analytics server 3238, application server, database server, etc.), a router, a device, or other common network node. Typically, the remote computer devices can include many of the elements described above with respect to computer 3202. In one embodiment, the remote computing devices serve as an external memory storage location for the component control engine 3230, power system topology modeling engine 3232, the component configuration engine 3236, and/or the component database 3236.