Service Oriented Architecture to Support Control Center Technology Upgrade
Project Objective
Developed a real-time Service Oriented Architecture for Integration of real-time applications at a Canadian System Operator.
Project Scope
The project is being executed in phases. Initial phases involved determining the suitability of using a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) as opposed to point-to-point integration of systems within the system operator. This was driven by several factors:
- The system operator was preparing to evaluate EMS vendors for procurement of a new EMS and determined that an integration strategy was needed
- The system operator had a set of home grown applications that were vital to operations and needed to be integrated either with or without the new EMS
- The new EMS would be deployed using four instances at two geographically separated sites for availability reasons
- The new EMS would need to be integrated with a dozen other systems
The later phases of this project involved the development of a proof of concept (POC) to prove the RSOA architecture. The project is currently entering the implementation phase where the results of earlier phases will be leveraged to integrate the new EMS procured from Areva within the enterprise.
The initial phases involved collecting requirements relevant to the integration of operator systems to an EMS, as well as several home-grown, but mission critical stability applications. This included the development of use cases, identification of systems, identification of information flows, etc. It was readily identified that there were needs for high availability, fault tolerance, guaranteed delivery and other factors that dictated the definition of a Real-time Service-Oriented Architecture (RSOA). This required more than just the use of web services for integration. A key factor was a plan for providing for seamless failover and transfer of control between one of two geographically separated sites, where there would be two redundant EMS instances at each site. Certainly it was vital that all requests and messages were directed to the ‘online’ EMS instance at the ‘online’ site, where the online site and EMS instance would change dynamically.
For each system and application an integration approach was identified. Candidate integration technologies were also identified. One aspect of this was information modeling, where many of the exchanges could leverage the IEC CIM. Given that the integration involved exchanges between business and operations systems, security was a significant concern. Specific security issues and technology options were identified and assessed. An approach for integration was defined by the RSOA, where a key factor was to avoid the risks and high development costs seen by some other SOA efforts within utilities.
It was determined that there was significant value in developing a proof of concept system. The evaluation of technologies led to the use of TIBCO BusinessWorks, EMS and Hawk for the development of the RSOA POC system. The RSOA POC implementation provided the means for the system operator to prove the following:
- Integrate a variety of systems and applications (using the capabilities of TIBCO BusinessWorks)
- Measure the performance of small, medium, large and very large XML messages
- The ability to automatically detect failures (leveraging Hawk capabilities)
- The ability to direct request and event messages to the appropriate destination(s), reflecting the failure and failover from one instance of a service to another at potentially another location (this leveraged capabilities from Hawk, BW and EMS)
- Delivery guarantees
- Verify that a common message envelop scheme could be used in order to minimize the amount of development and maintenance that would be required
- Verify that key integration standards (e.g. XML, XSD, XSLT, SOAP, JMS, J2EE, WSDL, JDBC, SMTP, SSL, X.509) were provided by TIBCO BW and EMS as appropriate
- Verify that basic security mechanisms were provided by TIBCO EMS and BW
- Verify that the IEC CIM could be used for information exchanges
- Prove that the development effort required could be significantly reduced through the use of TIBCO BW in conjunction with a pragmatic SOA architecture as defined by the RSOA as compared to other SOA efforts using other approaches
The RSOA was tested and verified to address all concerns related to the integration of applications and systems to the EMS, from the perspectives of integration, availability, fault tolerance, performance, security and functionality. The efforts of this project were directly factored into the operator EMS RFP, evaluation criteria, vendor selection and integration technology selection.
The next phase of the project, implementation, is in progress. UISOL is working with the system operator and the EMS vendor Areva to integrate the EMS, leveraging the work performed in prior phases.
Services Provided by UISOL
- Requirements Analysis
- Identification of Use Cases
- Identification of applicable integration standards
- Identification of integration alternatives
- Technology and product assessment
- Architecture
- Design
- Implementation
- Testing
List of Systems
- Energy Management System (EMS)
- PI Database
- Real-Time Stability Applications
- Transmission Scheduling System
- Dispatch and Compliance Monitoring
- Weather System
- Load Forecasting
- Control Room Operating Window
- Hydro Generation Dispatch
- Load Allocation Factors
- Trouble Call System
- Inter-Control Center Protocol (ICCP)