The Benefits of Standardized Web Services Based on the IEC 61970 Generic Interface Definition for Electric Utility Control Center Application Integration

The power system operations applications that are used in the modern electric utility control center are highly specialized applications that have traditionally been installed as stand-alone systems that interface to the power system through the use of remote terminal units (RTU) using communication protocol based. These protocol based interfaces are not well suited for integration of the power system applications with the business applications of the utility. On the business side for non-real time systems such as finance, customer information systems, and asset management, the information technology (IT) industry has been advancing at a tremendous pace to provide application integration technology based on web services and service oriented architecture middleware that dramatically decreases the complexity, programming effort, and cost to build and maintain an integration infrastructure that enables these applications to cooperate in the execution of the utility enterprise's business objectives. Because of the highly specialized nature of power system operations applications, the cost of applying these generic IT solutions has remained quite high. The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) technical committee 57 (TC57) working groups 13 and 14 (WG13 and WG14) have developed a set of standards that enable web services and SOA middleware technology to be more effectively applied to the integration of power system applications in electric utilities. This paper shall present the benefits of applying the generic interface definition (GID) of IEC 61970 to power system operations applications and how the GID fits into the general industry trend of using web services and SOA