IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2020 - 28

* Expensive Custom Integration
(US$300 per Line of Code)
* US$3 Billion Out of US$9 Billion DOE ARRA
Grant Spent on Custom Interfaces
* Potential Attack Vector for Each
Custom Interface
* Unsecured! No Testing and Certification

NISC

SCADA

GIS

AMI

SCADA

Aclara
Milsoft

Traditional IT Data Structure

Meter
Reading

GIS

Survalent

CIS
Interfaces

OMS

CIS

IVR

STAKE

figure 2. The expensive and unsecured custom interfaces. DOE: U.S. Department of Energy; ARRA: American Recovery
and Reinvestment Act; GIS: geographic information system; CIS: customer information system; EA: engineering analysis;
IVR: interactive voice response; STAKE: staking and design. (Source: White River Valley Electric/Chris Hamon, chief executive officer; used with permission.)

System 1

System 2

Internal
Database

Internal
Database
Custom Interface
$$$

The custom interface must be modified when either of
the two internal databases changes, which is a slow,
expensive process.

figure 3. The challenges with the time-consuming, expensive custom interface.

components, such as OMSs, SCADA systems, DERMs,
advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), and mobile applications, represent the single largest challenge for ADMS
design and deployment.
In an ADMS, systems are integrated to seamlessly share
network models, measurements, database values, and control signals. An effective ADMS platform has to balance the
limitations of the past, the needs of today, and the unknown
challenges of the future. Utilities commonly deploy ADMSs
for advanced applications, such as fault location; isolation,
and service restoration; volt-var control/volt-var optimization; the integration of DERs; demand response (DR)
programs; planned and unplanned switching management;
and other functionalities. One of the major reasons for the
interoperability issue is that each software system often uses
its own data models and/or proprietary protocols, which are
frequently not transportable between vendors. For example,
28

ieee power & energy magazine

it would be unusual for an OMS from vendor A to connect
with a demand management system from vendor B without
extensive and costly integration efforts that almost always
involve proprietary, custom interface work that is unscalable
and nontransferable.

Challenge: Expensive, Unsecured,
Customized Integration
An interoperability solution created to ease connectivity
among utility systems can provide a cost-effective solution
for the ADMS integration challenge. In the late 1990s, 800plus electric distribution cooperatives and members of the
National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA)
were dealing with two major integration obstacles to connecting disparate software systems. The first was the high cost of
creating custom interfaces, and the second concerned unsecured and nonstandardized interfaces. Each of the custom
interfaces between the different components, such as OMS-
AMI, SCADA-OMS, and so forth, is a potential attack vector that compromises cybersecurity. Figure 2 represents eight
software systems from four vendors in a real example from the
White River Valley Electric Co-op that highlights the challenge of custom interfaces. Another issue is that traditional
utility IT data structures were siloed and required expensive
custom interfaces. Figure 3 illustrates that a change in any
two internal database models requires new modifications to
the interface and results in additional costs. In fact, research
shows that out of the US$9 billion allocated through the U.S.
DOE ARRA Smart Grid grant, one third of the money, or
US$3 billion, was spent on custom interfaces/integration.
The challenges with custom software interfaces extend to
the ADMS integration obstacles: the à la carte approach, siloed
january/february 2020

IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2020