CASE STUDY: Unicorn Systems Damas Transelectrica Upgrade
Early in year 2021 was published the tender for the Damas Upgrade. The placed proposal by Unicorn was evaluated as the winning one and after several rounds of on-line negotiations, due to the Covid19 travelling restrictions, we eventually reached the contractual signature date - 17th of August.
The originally operated Damas in Transelectrica was developed in the previous decade and was reaching the edges of its exploitability for the challenges which TSOs across Europe are facing nowadays. This negative situation was even boosted thanks to the fact that the Damas Transelectrica covers almost all areas of the TSO responsibilities, so it was from its very beginning one of the most complex implementation of Damas system in Europe.
The Damas Upgrade project brings Transelectrica the newest version of the Damas MMS:E, based on the latest technologies, assure the system compliance with the modern pan-European platforms and long-term system operability and extensibility. Unicorn Systems has an extensive knowledge of energy industry standards and is keen to apply innovations and design smart solutions. Thanks to that, Unicorn clients get solutions with the highest possible value-added, simplifying, accelerating, and streamlining their business processes. To develop software quickly, reliably, and securely, we have been continuously building and using the Unicorn Application Framework (UAF), which provides the foundation upon which Unicorn is building all of our products. Also the new Damas MMS:E for Transelectrica is built on the UAF.
Technology and business upgrade challenges
The Damas Transelectrica Upgrade has been a complete system rebuild on a new, modern technologies and operation in cloud, owned by Transelectrica. Therefore the project was delivered using the Agile approach in regular sprints with the tight cooperation of Unicorn Software Factory development teams, located in various cities of Czech Republic (e.g., Pilsen, Písek, Prague). Due many business domains needed to be covered by a single system, the Damas MMS:E solution is provided using the microservice approach where each business domain is loosely coupled and as such it may run autonomously (if needed).
- Balancing - the Balancing module has been rebuilt to allow Transelectrica manage its power grid stability locally (i.e., based on the balancing offers submitted solely on Romanian market), and newly also by offers activated at Pan-European balancing platforms MARI, TERRE, PICASSO).
- Ancillary Services - the module rebuild covered the configuration for Long-term and Short-term tendering of procured ancillary services and the Secondary market with ancillary services.
- Domestic Scheduling - covers domestic units' production and consumption planning and outages management.
- Cross-border Scheduling - the module follows the cross-border allocation, i.e., it provides:
- Long-term, Day-ahead, Intra-day cross-border nominations and matching with TSOs and Verification Platform.
- Cross-Border Transmission - this module needed to be adapted especially to Day-ahead Implicit allocations operated in Core region. Generally, the module provides to users:
- Long-term, Day-ahead, Intra-day Explicit auctions operated by TSO, JAO
- Day-ahead Implicit auctions operated as a part of Core and Non-Core Region.
- Cross-border Intraday auctions operated by XBID Platform.
- Secondary Market with allocated transmission capacity
- Curtailment of cross-border transmission capacity
- Settlement - the module evaluates financial data for the transactions made in:
- Cross-border Transmission auctions
- Ancillary Services tenders
- Regulation Services & System Imbalance settlement
- Public screens accessible without authentication/authorization
- MS Excel reports on-demand and regularly generated
- Support of data download in common file formats, e.g., PDF, CSV, XLSX
Due to the complexity of the whole Transelectrica Damas MMS:E solution, Unicorn and Transelectrica were jointly meticulously working on the Damas MMS:E development, and reached the newest Damas MMS:E version successful deployed on the production environment in 2024. However, Unicorn support continues providing the post go-live maintenance as 24/7 service, including:
- the regular maintenance meetings,
- operation monitoring and preventive vulnerabilities scanning,
- maintenance support.
