IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2020 - 93

standardized model for current
ADMSs; each vendor and utility
has different approaches to implementation and deployment. The
vendors have different origins: supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, outage
management systems, and/or advanced power system applications.
The resulting architectures reflect
these origins. It is suspected that
second generation of these systems will have more commonality regarding integrations and
user interfaces.
5) Not all the benefits for an ADMS
can be quantified. The business case
should also take into consideration
soft savings, such as improved customer satisfaction, cost reductions
in other departments (e.g., reduced
crew deployments), improvements
in the hosting capacity and operation of DERs, the development of
NWAs, and others. Some of these
are difficult to quantify.
6) Not every utility will need a full
suite of applications right from the
beginning. Some may start with
a distribution SCADA system
because a free-standing outage
management system already exists. Some utilities may use their
existing SCADA system within
their transmission energy management system and just want an outage management system. Others
may want a distribution SCADA
system, an outage management
system, and one or two advanced applications.
A decision to deploy an ADMS is a
serious one for the utility. In addition
to the high cost of system implementation integration with other systems,
an ADMS is one of the biggest investments made by the utility in its future, a future with automated meter
infrastructure, DERs, NWAs, and a greater customer involvement in responding
to the state of the grid.

A Path Forward
Looking to the future, ADMS capabilities are crucial to electric power distrijanuary/february 2020

bution system planning, operations,
management, and control in systems
with high levels of DERs. This problem
affects distribution utilities of all sizes
throughout the world. There are three
challenges to enabling broad deployment
of an ADMS by distribution utilities.

Challenge 1: Reducing the
Time and Cost to Integrate
Utilities have difficulties interfacing with
legacy systems, back office systems, and
field data. The evolution of their system through the deployment of distribution automation, advanced metering
infrastructure, or new sensing and measurement technologies could introduce
additional integration costs in addition
to those incurred during an ADMS deployment. Finally, the deployment of
functionality from multiple vendors also
generally introduces integration time
and cost issues to achieve desired crossvendor interoperability.

Challenge 2: Testing
and Evaluation
Utilities must be able to test and evaluate advanced functionality before making
the initial investment in an ADMS. This
need reoccurs when considering changes to the distribution system or adding
functionality to an installed ADMS.

Challenge 3: Access to
Functionality (Applications)
Meeting the Needs of the
Individual Utility
The functionality needed by utilities
differs depending on factors such as
the size of the utility, the level of distribution automation, the structure of the
distribution network, and the level
of customer owned DERs. Utilities
would like to be able to select functionality that matches their specific planning and operational needs.

Responding
to the Challenges
While there are many possible responses to these challenges, the following set
is especially promising. It would be
good for every utility and vendor to review them.

✔ Open source distribution appli-

cations platform: Develop the
system on a standards-based platform with published and open
application programming interfaces. These changes would
allow the development and deployment of applications in a
standardized manner and, in addition, provide for a testing and
evaluation framework to assess
their relative benefits from both
efficacy and benefits perspectives. The standards should also
extend to data and data models.
This standards-based platform
would then make the systems and
applications more available to all
stakeholders.
✔ ADMS testbeds: There is a serious
need for comprehensive testing
and testbed capabilities to test the
ADMS application functionality
and performance. The testing cases need to span multiple scenarios
and situations under different circuit and power system model configurations. In addition, they also
need to span multiple loading and
performance considerations. Allowing for systems and applications to be tested under common
and standard situations will allow
strengths and weaknesses to be
identified at both the application
and system levels.
✔ ADMS applications: Applications
need to be developed not only by
vendors but also by appropriate
parties having the right levels of
expertise. The kinds of problems
that need to be solved in today's
ADMSs and related systems include 1) the integration of high
levels of distributed renewables,
2) improvements in operational
visibility, 3) ma nagement of
the reliability and resiliency of
the grid, and 4) the operation
of utility and/or customer microgrids. The expertise to address
these issues could come from the
vendor community, researchers,
academia, or others. Today, it is
almost impossible to integrate an
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IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2020

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