Development of a real-time framework for enterprise integration - NRECA´s MultiSpeak®2 specification

Enterprise application integration has been an elusive goal for utilities for many years. Integration, particularly among operations applications -such as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), automated meter reading (AMR), outage management (OMS), and load management (LM) systems -has been particularly difficult. Such integration, where possible at all, has often required costly custom programming. The expense and complexity of custom integration has often prohibited small utilities from achieving successful interaction among operations applications. The MultiSpeak® Initiative is a collaborative effort of software vendors sponsored by the Cooperative Research Network of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. During 2000, the Initiative developed a specification for common data interfaces among back-office applications widely applied at distribution cooperatives. The Initiative has developed extensions to that specification to include: (i) SCADA, AMR, OMS, LM, and customer relationship management interfaces and (ii) a messaging framework to support real-time communications among the supported applications, both operations and back-office. This paper discusses the development of the operations support application interfaces and the real-time messaging framework. It also discusses how these specification enhancements can facilitate cost-effective application integration in small utilities.