New energy management system architectural design and Intranet/Internet applications to power systems

Utility companies are facing various deregulation and automation challenges. New guidelines have to be gradually defined in the evolving open-access market. Power system engineers need a set of state-of-the-art applications, e.g., OASIS and power resource trading, to analyze system reliability and/or gain economic benefits. The existing energy management system (EMS) functionality could not handle these new needs, e.g., energy buy/sale, new economic dispatch, etc., and need to be enhanced immediately. This paper investigates new power system application development requirements and propose a flexible EMS architectural design. The matured Intranet/Internet, relational database, and object-oriented technologies are fully utilized in the new infrastructure. The proposed EMS architecture has the features of flexibility, openness, consistent user-interface, etc. Therefore, it can meet the system migration and future enhancement requirements. The presented methodology has been successfully applied to the prototyping implementation of an energy accounting (EA) application. The results, benefits, and decision-making process of using the proposed approach are also reported.