Model building and maintenance as a hosted service

Summary form only given. With the advent of ISOs , RTOs, reliability authorities, planning authorities, and others, maintaining large databases of system transmission network and generation models has become one of the critical factors in the success of such organizations. The size of the system model databases grow rapidly with the merging and consolidation of territories served by various entities and with the expanding requirements. The complexity of the models are also increasing due to the wide range of requirements and data needs imposed by the many applications that the models are to support. System models are initially created by merging the information from various entities in dispersed locations in different formats with varying levels of detail, using different naming conventions. These models need to be updated on a regular basis with inputs from many sources. Once the initial model is formed, or updates are made, the results need to be bench-marked using the de-facto industry-standard tools. Once validated, the results need to be made available to many external users on-demand. The development and rollout of an infrastructure in-house to support the process of model creation, update, validation, and dissemination could be a very costly proposition. In addition to IT infrastructure and support, power system and market expertise are required for user and application support, as well as for data maintenance. Furthermore, depending on the nature of the databases and applications, 24times7 system and client support may be required. In this presentation we discuss the requirements for a model building and maintenance system, including the functional, organizational, IT infrastructure, and application requirements. We then discuss the many advantages that can be gained by rolling out the system as a hosted service