Case study: Flow Management System

NETA (New Electricity Trading Arrangements) specifies the handling of all transactions which cater for individual contracts between electricity generators and consumers in the UK.

The role of DataHub

The Cygnet DataHub provides the heart of the messaging facilities at the ScottishPower Grid Control Centre (Grid System Operation), within ScottishPower’s systems for NETA.

For this particular application, the Cygnet DataHub performs the role of a ‘Flows Management System’ (FMS), and is the central hub for communication between a large number of internal and external systems participating in the overall NETA systems network.

Scope

The FMS deals with some 130 discrete types of data flow, with frequency of transfer ranging from a few seconds to several hours.

The system processes in excess of one million transactions per annum.

Data flow delivery is guaranteed by DataHub. It ensures that transfers are correctly resumed after failure of interfacing systems, or indeed if the FMS itself has previously failed (e.g., due to a hardware fault). In the latter case, once restarted, DataHub continues with any outstanding transfers that were incomplete at the time of failure.

Special features

DataHub deals with all data validation and conversion requirements. For example, messages arriving from external systems in a ‘foreign’ format are first assured to be correct by performing validation checks against an external data format specification, before being converted to a format suitable for internal processing.

DataHub also monitors certain events and is configured to raise email alerts to operators and support staff on occurrence of certain event types, such as the arrival of a specific data flow from an external system.

FMS makes use of the encryption features within the Cygnet DataHub to allow certain data flows to be sent securely over public networks such as the Internet. Data flows to be encrypted are passed to an encryption engine, before being sent on by DataHub to their ultimate destination. C