Real-time Inter-systems Communications Capabilities Lag, but DNP 3 Continues as the Preferred Protocol for Operational Data Communications
December 1, 2012. Ellicott City, Maryland. The Newton-Evans Research Company has released interim findings from its current study of EMS, SCADA, DMS and OMS usage patterns in North American electric power utilities, one of four components of the company’s global market assessment series on operational control systems.
Among the initial observations gleaned from interviews and surveys with 50 initial participants from a wide range of participating U.S. and Canadian electric utilities, are the following:
- Energy Management Systems (EMS), supervisory control systems (SCADA), distribution management systems (DMS) and outage management systems (OMS) are likely to show very good growth over the 2013-2015 years, in light of the positive responses from this initial group of utility responses.
- Plans call for upgrades or retrofits to SCADA systems among a large percentage of these utilities
- Plans for procurements of new DMS and (OMS) are significant, with more than one quarter planning to purchase a new or replacement DMS and nearly one-in-five planning OMS procurements.
- There is interest shown among one-third of these early respondents to combining DMS and OMS on a common platform, but cyber security concerns have been voiced by several operations officials looking into such system combinations.
- Third party services are being used and relied upon to assist with NERC CIP compliance issues and for the conduct of vulnerability assessments.
- DNP 3 continues to be the most prevalent operational data communications protocol throughout North American electric power utilities. Plans call for continuing the use of DNP 3 for the foreseeable future, among the majority of these utilities.
- More than a score of additional topics are surveyed in this new study including the impact of NERC CIP compliance on budgets and workloads; distribution network model maintenance; hardware maintenance responsibilities and preferences for new applications procurement methods.
The North American report is one of four volumes being produced for the company’s fourteenth bi- annual series of EMS, SCADA and DMS studies published by Newton-Evans Research since 1984. Work on the other three volumes is underway; the entire series will be published in January 2013.
Further information on this new series entitled The World Market Study of SCADA, Energy Management Systems and Distribution Management Systems in Electric Utilities: 2013-2015 is available from Newton-Evans Research Company, 10176 Baltimore National Pike, Suite 204, Ellicott City, Maryland 21042. Phone: 410-465-7316 or visit us at www.newton-evans.comor to order any of more than 100 related reports. For readers interested in purchasing this new series please call or email the company for special introductory pricing. Chuck Newton can be reached at cnewton@newton-evans.com.
summary reviews and highlights from completed studies
