A Unified User Interface Using Microfrontends for Energy Data Sharing Infrastructure

A consistent and performant frontend across multiple, independent services and deployments is considered one of the main challenges in distributed data infrastructures, especially in the energy domain dealing with end-users and third parties. Our work contributes to a unified interface with seamless integration into applications and a consistent user experience with respect to the processes the user goes through despite complex workflows. We develop an interface using microfrontends to request permission for energy data sharing between customers and eligible parties through national and regional data providers. We study different aspects of the microfrontend architecture in terms of boundaries, composition, routing, and communication to decide about the tools and technologies used in our implementation. Furthermore, we demonstrate our permission request interface within the European Distributed Data Infrastructure for Energy (EDDIE) project, which defines the permission request process to access data from different data providers and implements an infrastructure using microservices to share energy data. We consider best practices to select architecture relevant to our use case through discussing some companies using microfrontends in production and their approaches. Finally, we provide an outlook on performance showing high responsiveness, light resource utilization, and minimal interaction delay.