Issue 35 - System Operator Newsletter
Issue 35: 27 August 2009
Market Systems Update
- Our new market systems have now been live for 5 weeks. Overall we have been very pleased with the transition. We have been impressed, as well as delighted with the support we have received from the industry. This has been really positive, especially as we have been resolving a small number of 'bedding in' matters. This newsletter updates these issues.
- when the new systems went live, market data was being published for additional market nodes causing downstream problems for some participants. At the request of participants, Transpower has stopped the publication of additional data, via a software patch effective on 21 August
- at go-live there was a potential issue with outage block and component mapping (see our 21st July newsletter). This problem has been fixed via a software patch effective on 24 July.
- the Special Winter Schedule (SWS) publication recommenced on 13 August. We were pleased this change could be effected within 3 weeks of MSP going live (albeit with a few publication problems, now resolved).
- there remain some market node publication issues in EMS's EM6 product which result from changes made to any market node in the system. While this problem is currently corrected manually after each change occurs, it does result in a small time window where published data is inaccurate. Transpower is working to correct the problem and a fix is expected in an early software upgrade release.
- we did experience a number of transition issues between NZX, Transpower and participant systems though we believe these are now all resolved. The project included a long parallel operation phase and this provided Transpower with a high degree of confidence at go live. It is impossible to run a "truly" parallel operation and this resulted in some unpredicted behaviour with firewalls, interface performance and, in a few areas, with the information being published after go-live.
We welcome any questions about the new systems.
Contact: market.services@transpower.co.nz
Future market systems change releases
For some time we have indicated that changes to the new systems will be managed differently than before, where changes were made on a less-scheduled, ‘as ready’ basis. A new change management approach is now in place.
Set out below is a preliminary timetable for software changes releases for the market systems.
Early market system releases
The early releases to the market systems will:
- address urgent defects and provide small changes that are straightforward to implement
- enable the System Operator and Transpower’s IT group to gain practical experience of releasing updates to the market systems in production.
For these releases, the overall approach is to select items which are:
- required by the System Operator
- clearly expressed and ready for implementation, being items that generally need little design work
- standalone, and do not have complex inter-relationships with other changes
- small in scale and fit easily into a short release cycle.
A short release cycle necessarily limits the scale of items that can be included. The intention is to move to a longer cycle in which more substantive items for both the System Operator and market participants can be delivered.
Therefore, as the release cycle length increases, the emphasis will change to include work that:
- has more substantial business content (System Operations and market-related)
- requires a larger development effort and analysis and design works
- has an increased test requirement.
Proposed release cycle
We intend to advise market participants of the content of forthcoming releases (unless for purely technical or non-functional purposes). NZX will continue to advise participants of intended system outages which occur as upgrades are implemented.
The initial releases schedule starts with a 4-week cycle, increasing to a 6- or 8-week cycle until Christmas 2009. A release is proposed early in 2009 leading into the longer-term 12-week cycle. The preliminary release dates are as follows:
