Application of object-oriented techniques to software development in an EMS environment

Power system operations and control are becoming more and more complex. The developers are being forced to analyze multiple environments (PC/workstations, expert systems or procedural systems, structural programming or object-oriented (OO) programming, and others) in order to deliver the capabilities that are expected from them. In this paper, the authors share some of the insights that they have learned over the period of developing applications in a multi-hardware platform/multi-operating system environment: application of OO technology to simplify the software design, maintenance, and integration processes; provide a unified abstract interface to be integrated with other software components; use the same OO paradigm to design various parts of the system; provide an intuitive user interface; and reduce software development and maintenance costs. The authors have also provided a source database design case study to illustrate the use of OO technology in EMS application development. Some ideas explored in this paper have been fully utilized.