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Home > Resources > Case Study > Northern California Power Agency
Fiorano Platform sparks web services-based energy scheduling solution for Northern California Power Agency
NCPA is a California Joint Action Agency, with municipalities, rural electric cooperatives, and other public entities as members, for whom it provides services such as the purchase, aggregation, scheduling, and management of electrical energy. It operates and maintains a fleet of power plants that are among the cleanest in the nation.
Fiorano Platform sparks web services-based energy scheduling solution for Northern California Power Agency
NCPA is a California Joint Action Agency, with municipalities, rural electric cooperatives, and other public entities as members, for whom it provides services such as the purchase, aggregation, scheduling, and management of electrical energy. It operates and maintains a fleet of power plants that are among the cleanest in the nation.
USE CASE
Legacy integration. Web services Architecture. JMS
BENEFITS
Regulatory. Reduced cost
INDUSTRY
Energy
KEY PRODUCT COMPONENTS
Fiorano Platform, Fiorano MQ
Business Challenge
The energy business is becoming increasingly difficult with regulations in California in a constant state of flux and compressed timelines for energy scheduling that can be as few as just hours.
NCPA's primary business partners have been moving to XML-based web services as the preferred method for data exchange. However, NCPA had historically used a data-centric client/server model to facilitate data flows with members and outside partners. The agency also wrote many of its own applications using a monolithic approach which did not allow the development and reuse of common libraries. "Total cost of ownership for our legacy applications was rising," Myers noted. It became clear that to leverage the benefits of our partners' approach, we needed to move to a layered web application architecture." At the same time, the IT management team also knew it needed a business integration Platform that could leverage NCPA's well conceived database structure with legacy and new applications & services. The challenges the company needed to address were:
- Communicating with several partner applications near real-time
- Empower the existing .Net applications to absorb the growing data transfer between applications.
- Integrating with external XML based application (web services in particular).
- Pegging the rising cost of Legacy management.
600,000+
Californians served with affordable, clean energy
Fiorano Platform enabled legacy integration
Business Challenge
The energy business is becoming increasingly difficult with regulations in California in a constant state of flux and compressed timelines for energy scheduling that can be as few as just hours.
NCPA's primary business partners have been moving to XML-based web services as the preferred method for data exchange. However, NCPA had historically used a data-centric client/server model to facilitate data flows with members and outside partners. The agency also wrote many of its own applications using a monolithic approach which did not allow the development and reuse of common libraries. "Total cost of ownership for our legacy applications was rising," Myers noted. It became clear that to leverage the benefits of our partners' approach, we needed to move to a layered web application architecture." At the same time, the IT management team also knew it needed a business integration Platform that could leverage NCPA's well conceived database structure with legacy and new applications & services. The challenges the company needed to address were:
- Communicating with several partner applications near real-time
- Empower the existing .Net applications to absorb the growing data transfer between applications.
- Integrating with external XML based application (web services in particular).
- Pegging the rising cost of Legacy management.
600,000+
Californians served with affordable, clean energy
Fiorano Platform enabled legacy integration
"Fiorano Platform-enabled web services architecture is invaluable. We can now do things we simply couldn't before; efficiently share data with members, have flexibility to respond to regulatory & market changes as they occur and members benefit through lower electric bills."
Mark Myers, Application Architect, Northern California Power Agency [NCPA]
"Fiorano Platform-enabled web services architecture is invaluable. We can now do things we simply couldn't before; efficiently share data with members, have flexibility to respond to regulatory & market changes as they occur and members benefit through lower electric bills."
Mark Myers, Application Architect, Northern California Power Agency [NCPA]
Solution
The ideal solution that NCPA was looking for was a middleware that would allow them to:
- Seamlessly communicate with the partner applications at very high rate of message transfer at near real time
- Allow easy intra application data transfer with minimum manual work
- Integrate applications with XML web services on the fly
- Help retain the existing data kept in legacy
Within weeks of its choice, the NCPA development team began installing Fiorano Platform between its Oracle databases and its mix of in-house and off-the-shelf software. The agency started small, employing one or two developers to connect with a few NCPA-built applications, and then adding staff and additional applications as it learned.
"Fiorano was very good about resolving any issue we encountered," Myers recalled. "Unlike many software vendors, Fiorano's technical staff is comprised of former product developers, so we could easily talk about deep technical issues with them."
Solution
The ideal solution that NCPA was looking for was a middleware that would allow them to:
- Seamlessly communicate with the partner applications at very high rate of message transfer at near real time
- Allow easy intra application data transfer with minimum manual work
- Integrate applications with XML web services on the fly
- Help retain the existing data kept in legacy
Within weeks of its choice, the NCPA development team began installing Fiorano Platform between its Oracle databases and its mix of in-house and off-the-shelf software. The agency started small, employing one or two developers to connect with a few NCPA-built applications, and then adding staff and additional applications as it learned.
"Fiorano was very good about resolving any issue we encountered," Myers recalled. "Unlike many software vendors, Fiorano's technical staff is comprised of former product developers, so we could easily talk about deep technical issues with them."
Application architecture for NCPA using Fiorano Platform
JMS Messaging Service infrastructure
For intra application communication, since NCPA used Java Messaging Service, business objects had to be serialized and compressed to a base 64 string encoding. The receiver then decompressed and deserialized the object.
"We were able to create a remote application capability using serialized .NET classes," Myers mentioned. "The process is similar to .NET Remoting, but since we use Java Messaging Service, we instead serialize and compress business objects to a base 64 string, using the string as the JMS payload. The receiver then decompresses and deserializes the object. This capability was an unexpected plus that has really added to the productivity of our system."
Rapid Business composition and Re-use of services
NCPA used Fiorano's C/C++/C# runtime to quickly wrap existing .Net code into a reusable service. They could now wrap existing legacy (.Net) code as a service/component for reuse. The Microsoft SQL database and Oracle database were connected to the Fiorano Platform. Deployment of the solution allowed:
- Rapid business process composition
- Runtime changes to the process
- Business Partner integration using XML and Dot Net Web Services standard
- Remote Deployment and Monitoring (start, restart, stop etc) of .Net applications.
- Out of box security for .Net applications
- Partner data transformation and content enrichment using XSLT standard.
- Asynchronous binary data exchange among C# applications
- Out of box high availability of .Net services and the system.
Application architecture for NCPA using Fiorano Platform
JMS Messaging Service infrastructure
For intra application communication, since NCPA used Java Messaging Service, business objects had to be serialized and compressed to a base 64 string encoding. The receiver then decompressed and deserialized the object.
"We were able to create a remote application capability using serialized .NET classes," Myers mentioned. "The process is similar to .NET Remoting, but since we use Java Messaging Service, we instead serialize and compress business objects to a base 64 string, using the string as the JMS payload. The receiver then decompresses and deserializes the object. This capability was an unexpected plus that has really added to the productivity of our system."
Rapid Business composition and Re-use of services
NCPA used Fiorano's C/C++/C# runtime to quickly wrap existing .Net code into a reusable service. They could now wrap existing legacy (.Net) code as a service/component for reuse. The Microsoft SQL database and Oracle database were connected to the Fiorano Platform. Deployment of the solution allowed:
- Rapid business process composition
- Runtime changes to the process
- Business Partner integration using XML and Dot Net Web Services standard
- Remote Deployment and Monitoring (start, restart, stop etc) of .Net applications.
- Out of box security for .Net applications
- Partner data transformation and content enrichment using XSLT standard.
- Asynchronous binary data exchange among C# applications
- Out of box high availability of .Net services and the system.
Results
With the new, Fiorano Platform-enabled web services environment taking shape, NCPA begun to realize the benefits of near-real time data exchange; scheduling decisions based on a demand forecast could be coordinated across NCPA network; market dispatch instructions could be received and validated prior to their issuance to generating plants; and data could be sent back in near real-time to NCPA members to help assess their position in the market. The architecture provided capabilities that significantly added to the productivity of the system.
To keep costs low for members, NCPA is adopting new applications that can coordinate power scheduling within collapsed timelines.
With no letup of regulatory changes or energy market volatility in sight, Myers says the new Fiorano Platform-enabled web services architecture is invaluable. "We can now do things we simply couldn't before," he states. "Not only can we efficiently share data with our members, but we also have the flexibility to accommodate regulatory and market changes as they occur through better integration, failover protection, and system monitoring. Best of all, the customers of our NCPA members are the ones that really benefit, through lower electric bills."
Results
With the new, Fiorano Platform-enabled web services environment taking shape, NCPA begun to realize the benefits of near-real time data exchange; scheduling decisions based on a demand forecast could be coordinated across NCPA network; market dispatch instructions could be received and validated prior to their issuance to generating plants; and data could be sent back in near real-time to NCPA members to help assess their position in the market. The architecture provided capabilities that significantly added to the productivity of the system.
To keep costs low for members, NCPA is adopting new applications that can coordinate power scheduling within collapsed timelines.
With no letup of regulatory changes or energy market volatility in sight, Myers says the new Fiorano Platform-enabled web services architecture is invaluable. "We can now do things we simply couldn't before," he states. "Not only can we efficiently share data with our members, but we also have the flexibility to accommodate regulatory and market changes as they occur through better integration, failover protection, and system monitoring. Best of all, the customers of our NCPA members are the ones that really benefit, through lower electric bills."
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