Brief History of MultiSpeak
MultiSpeak began with modest expectations in January, 2000 as a collaborative effort between NRECA and a small group of vendors supplying software to U.S. electric cooperatives. It has now grown significantly in coverage, capability, sophistication, and membership. Major milestones are discussed below.
Release of Version 1.1. Initially, the MultiSpeak Initiative focused on five back office software applications: (i) customer information systems (CIS), (ii) geographic information systems (GIS), (iii) engineering analysis (EA), (iv) interactive voice response (IVR), and (v) automated staking. By doing so, within twelve months, on December, 2000, the first MultiSpeak specification, Version 1.1 was released. That version defined seven interfaces and developed a data dictionary for the information that could meaningfully be exchanged among the target applications. Only batch file transfers were defined in Version 1.1. In addition, no provisions were made for incremental updates or for the deletion of data. Furthermore, the transfer of graphical data relied on proprietary graphics protocols. However, the first step had been taken, and the collaborative methods that would guide the development of MultiSpeak moving forward had been established.
Version 2.2 – Expansion of the MultiSpeak specification and extension to real-time processes. The MultiSpeak specification underwent continuous development for the next several years, and late in 2003, Version 2.2 was issued. This version extended the coverage of the specification to include: (i) supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), (ii) automated meter reading (AMR), (iii) outage management (OM), (iv) load management (LM), and (v) customer relationship management systems.
Version 2.2 carried forward provisions for batch transfers where they made sense to support utility business processes, but also made the significant step forward to support real-time integration. Both the batch and real-time messaging capabilities supported incremental updates and deletions with a high degree of granularity. The messaging framework was capable of supporting both request/response and publish/subscribe communications modes. At the time, the messaging framework was the state-of-the-art. The exchange of graphical data made use of the Geographic Markup Language (GML), an open-source, XML-based means to describe graphical features, that had been developed by the OpenGIS® Consortium, Inc.
Version 3.0 – Further expansion and introduction of web services. In December, 2005, the first release of MultiSpeak Version 3.0 was made. This is the most current major version of MultiSpeak, although it has undergone continuous improvement since the original release and is, as of March 2008, available to the general public through Build j and to MultiSpeak Members through Build q.
MultiSpeak 3 is significantly improved and expanded over Version 2.2 in a number of critical regards. One major change was the shift to the use of web services. The Version 2.2 messaging framework was very powerful and flexible and was state-of-the-art at the time that Version 2.2 was released. However, the flexibility of the messaging framework came at the price of additional complexity. Further, the flexibility increased the possibility that two vendors could implement compliant interfaces that could not interoperate – a significant drawback from the user perspective.
In the time between the release of Version 2.2 and late-2004, web services had evolved and matured to the point that their application to utility needs was appropriate and their adoption industry-wide was nearly assured. Furthermore, a significant number of software development toolkits that supported the new web services standards had become available, which enabled the MultiSpeak participants to efficiently develop web services interfaces. Therefore it was time for the Initiative to incorporate web services into the specification.
The first release of Version 3.0 also:
- Enhanced some of the underlying data definitions and better supported some business processes.
- Added a means to break large XML file transfers into blocks of arbitrary size to improve performance, minimize problems with parsing unmanageable files, and reduce network bandwidth constraints.
- Added a means to resynchronize the client and server in publish/subscribe interfaces without requiring the client to request a complete dump of all information from the server.
- Added a means to synchronize clients and servers based on groups of updates referred to as sessions.
- Added a new way to extend data objects at run time for real time interfaces.
Recent developments – CY 2007. The MultiSpeak specification continues to see significant development. Some of the more recent changes have included:
- A new bus architecture was developed and issued during CY2007. The bus structure better supports service-oriented architecture implementations.
- Support for meter data management, water and gas metering, electronic payment processing, prepaid metering, meter receiving and testing, as well as distribution automation was added to the specification.
- Five new builds of the Version 3.0 specification were issued during CY2007.
An overview of the current coverage of the MultiSpeak Specification is available here.
Current Development Plans. Version 4.0 is under development at this time and is expected to be released during 2008. Current development plans for MultiSpeak, including what is planned for inclusion in Version 4.0, are available in the Members section.