A Policy-Driven Method for IT Infrastructure Selection in Power Distribution Automation System

Abstract

Electric power utilities invest heavily on their IT infrastructures; however, a large number of IT development projects fail. These failures are mostly caused by unsystematic and ad hoc designs, which can be summarized as lack of consistent design decision methods. This consistent design decision method should include a well-aligned IT development plan, considering requirements of the needed system. The literature shows the positive effect of this alignment of the IT requirements with the utility corporate policy, referred to as being Policy-Driven, here. This paper proposes a Policy-Driven design decision method for electric utility IT development projects, based on Wymorian T3SD theory of systems design. The proposed method possesses the following two features. First, it is highly sensitive to corporate policy of the utility, as our proposed method is able to assure the alignment of the IT development to utility corporate policy. Second, the proposed method is able to deal with the multiple disciplines related to the utility business; which includes at least: the utility core technology (power and automation), IT, human resources and financial matters