MultiSpeak®2-a framework for real-time utility software integration

Effective integration of software has been an elusive goal for electric 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 electric distribution utilities from achieving successful interaction among operations applications. The MultiSpeak® Initiative is a collaborative effort by software vendors, sponsored by the cooperative research network of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. The Initiative has developed a specification that defines how a wide variety of application software provided by different vendors can be integrated in a platform, database, and operating system-independent manner. This is done using a real-time messaging framework and standard information systems protocols. This paper discusses the implementation of the application interfaces and the real-time messaging framework. It also discusses how the vendor-developed interfaces are tested for compliance with the specification.