Under the guidance of EPRI, the electric utility industry has
been working toward a “plug and play” environment in the electric
utility operations centers. The group sponsoring this activity
was originally known as the Control Center Application Program
Interface (CCAPI) working group. Their first block in a plug and
play foundation was developing the Common Information Model (CIM)
as a data representation for the technical data within an electric
utility. Work has continued to expand the CIM from transmission
operations into transmission and distribution planning, transmission
marketing, asset management, and many other areas within the electric
utility. The second block in the CCAPI foundation is being laid
by defining the types of data that would be transferred from one
software application to another. Upon completion of this phase
of the work, both a common data structure will be available for
use by electric utility applications and the message contents
and format will have been defined for interfacing the applications
to the message bus. This work will approach a plug and play environment.
Siemens PTI’s PSS™ODMS product line
was initiated to allow major EMS users the ability to import their
neighbor’s EMS network data and to combine this detailed model
with theirs. To provide this service, it was imperative that the
PSS™ODMS use a common data structure
to allow combining and managing operations data from diverse EMS
vendor models. To this end, PSS™ODMS
was one of the initial applications to adopt the CIM as its foundation.
With this commitment also came a commitment to continue to integrate
industry standards into the PSS™ODMS
infrastructure. In so doing, PSS™ODMS
has become an integration platform with a message bus structure
for diverse technical applications within the electric utility.
While back-office business applications are still working toward
standardizing interfaces, the technical software application interfaces
to a message bus have been evolving rapidly. Therefore, the time
is right for integrating technical applications via the industry
standards, while it may take some additional time for full enterprise
application integration
At the heart of PTI's Technical Application Integration architecture
is an Integration bus. Using Websphere MQ (IBM MQ Series), Vitrea,
WebMethods, Cbeyond, and other messaging bus technologies, PTI's
TAI architecture has been designed to be deployed in existing
IT infrastructures. The TAI Integration Bus can be directly interfaced
to the message bus that is selected by the corporate IT group
when they evolve into full enterprise integration. Little if any
effort is required to take the TAI solution and dovetail it directly
to the corporate IT solution.
What TAI offers PSS™ODMS clients
is the ability to efficiently integrate their technical applications
with all the benefits of the message bus integration methodology.
The values of TAI are many:
Use of industry standards throughout will maintain conformance
and will reduce future software purchase, installation, and
maintenance costs.
Eliminate vendor “captivity” when replacing software applications
in the TAIenvironment.
How PSS™ODMS fits with TAI
Below is a diagram illustrating Siemens PTI’s strategy for Technical
Application Integration of its CIM-based application suite, PSS™ODMS.
Basically Siemens PTI’s PSS™ODMS
application suite is designed to manage network models. As illustrated
by the diagram, PSS™ODMS includes
"Filters" to import electric network models from various
sources including other EMS applications, CIM/XML and our own
PSS™E application. PSS™ODMS
offers application modules to allow the user to view and edit
the model data graphically and via a CIM-based hierarchical view.
In 2003, Siemens PTI integrated is Power System Simulator for
Operators (PSS™O) module into the PSS™ODMS
application and hence created the PSS™ODMS
application. With PSS™O and a new SCADA integration module
- ICCPsync, operators can run a suite of EMS Network Apps against
the model using measurements from their SCADA. Finally, PSS™ODMS
offers a number of ’Filters’ to export the model data in various
formats.
With the introduction of PSS™O, Siemens PTI’s PSS™ODMS
application required tighter, real-time integration with other
enterprise application like SCADA, Measurement Historians, Load
Forecasting applications, etc. Siemens PTI developed a suite of
application modules under the Technical Application Integration
(TAI) Framework to achieve the required interpretability with
other applications.
TAI Application Modules
The suite of available TAI application modules include:
ICCPsync: Siemens PTI’s OPC DA (HSDA) client for gathering
and distributing realtime measurement data to PSS™ODMS
client applications.
ICCPmonitor: Siemens PTI’s application module designed to
monitor measurement communication between Siemens PTI apps and
alarm / notify system administrators when failures occur.
CIMconnect: Siemens PTI’s Generic Data Access (GDA) Server
used to read / write CIM-based model data managed by PSS™ODMS
to third-party application via Integration Bus technology. CIMaccess:
Siemens PTI’s Generic Data Access (GDA) Client used to view
CIM-based model data available on the Integration Bus.
CAPEconnect: Siemens PTI’s Generic Data Access (GDA) Server
used to read / write CIM-based model data managed by the Computer-Aided
Protection Engineering (CAPE) application to 3rd-party application
via the Integration Bus.
CAPEaccess: Siemens PTI’s Generic Data Access (GDA) Client
used to view CIMbased model data available on the Integration
Bus and, specifically, synchronize model data provided by CAPE
with the PSS™ODMS data repository.
The Future of TAI
Siemens PTI’s strategy is to continue to develop TAI application
modules to further enhance our capabilities to share data with
other applications. The diagram below, illustrates the types of
systems we currently interface with and new system we are working
towards including in our integration platform.
Operational Products Sales
Siemens Power Transmission & Distribution, Inc.
Power Technologies International
1482 Erie Boulevard, P.O. Box 1058
Schenectady, NY 12301-1058 USA
