California Demand Response Business Network (DRBizNet)
Project Objective
Design and Demonstration of an e-Community for End-to-End Management of Demand Response Business Processes in California
Project Scope
The Demand Response Business Network (DRBizNet) is a concept developed by UISOL for a highly flexible and automated network of collaboration exchanges and intelligent agents designed on open interoperability standards to support demand response in California. Wide-scale adoption of DRBizNet architecture will facilitate an efficient electronic collaboration and transparent exchange of information among business entities in the California demand response (DR) market, reducing the cost of demand response infrastructure in California. The DRBizNet project was funded as an enabling technology development R&D by the California Energy Commission and was managed by the California Institute for Energy and Environment (CIEE). The Project Team included UISOL (Prime contractor), Dynamic Networks, Nexant, TIBCO, and SAVVION. The project was conducted under the guidance of a ten-member Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) including representatives from the California ISO (CAISO), Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), and Southern California Edison (SCE).
DRBizNet has a Service Oriented Architecture, orchestrating standards-based Web services across a business network built on the Internet. The utility industry Common Information Model (CIM) is leveraged where applicable. DRBizNet includes distributed registries, DR Collaboration Exchanges, Intelligent Agents (IA), and standardized Web services interface with DR participants. The Web services include the services that will be provided by utilities, customers, aggregators, and other service providers, using standardized, secure, protocols. Utilities can readily introduce new DR programs through DRBizNet. Participants can readily register and participate in various programs. Many of the participants’ actions are automated through Intelligent Agents that can take actions on behalf of the participants based on the specifics of the DR programs obtained from the DR Collaboration Exchanges and the parameters specific to each participant. Implementation of each DR Program is highly automated through configuring Workflow Engines at DR Collaboration Exchanges, minimizing the need for inflexible and expensive-to-change hard coding of DR programs.
Security was a significant issue within the design of DRBizNet, given the diversity of access to and communications within DRBizNet. At the highest level, DRBizNet is realized using a federated set of DR Collaboration Exchange (DRX) servers. These servers exchange signals using authenticated and encrypted communications based upon TIBCO EMS. There is also web access for customers, program managers and the ISO, where a role-based login scheme was used. Given that the architecture was designed to enable communication to and coordination of potentially millions of low cost end-points, a public/private key scheme was used to authenticate Intelligent Agents (IA) that communicated with the DRX using SOAP. SSL is used to encrypt messages from the IA to the DRX.
Where there are currently over 20 types of messages that can be exchanged between the DRX and the IA, it was only necessary to define a single WSDL that is unaffected by the definition of new message types using a common message envelope with flexible payload. The message envelope and payloads were all defined using XML schema. This provides significant benefits with respect to versioning and evolution. This avoids many of the issues seen when a separate WSDL is defined for each message type, as is often done by default for many SOA implementations. DRBizNet also leverages SMTP for sending signals to program participants.
As the next step in the project, a field demonstration was undertaken. The California ISO and the three major investor owned utilities in California (PG&E, SCE, and San Diego Gas and Electric) participated in the demonstration. We successfully demonstrated the technology through a live demonstration involving 9 entities in August 2006.
Services Provided by UISOL
- As-Is state analysis
- To-Be state design
- Gap analysis
- Benefits and business case
- Requirements definition
- Architecture
- Implementation Roadmap
- Technology analysis
- Solution development and demonstration
- Field installation at several utilities in California
List of Systems
- TIBCO BusinessWorks
- TIBCO EMS
- Savvion BusinessManager
- MessageTek Intelligent Agent
- BEA WebLogic
- Advantech ADAM