ICCP DESIGN REQUIREMENTS FOR OPTIMUM AVAILABILITY AND
PERFORMANCE
Background: The NERC Data Exchange Working Group ICCP Design Requirements were developed in
response to availability and performance issues that surfaced as NERC implemented the multi-vendor
Interregional Security Network (ISN). With the tremendous increase of energy transactions it is becoming even
more critical that we have a highly available and responsive data exchange system. Without such a data
exchange system, it will be impossible to ensure the necessary reliability of the national electrical grid.
Requirements:
1. The Communications Network Processor (CNP) performing ICCP functions shall attempt to re-establish lost
Associations that may have resulted from a communication failure between CNP(s) and/or due to a
reconfiguration of a CNP. The CNP shall continue to retry indefinitely, alternating between redundant paths,
if defined, until the Associations are re-established or the process is manually stopped. Additionally, CNPs
acting in a slave mode shall remain in a state ready to establish the Association.
2. ICCP systems shall provide an immediate indication detectable by its respective Energy Management System
for any event that results in the interruption of data collection services. The data-quality flag of the affected
points shall immediately be marked as SUSPECT.
3. Data points shall be marked with a data-quality flag as SUSPECT whenever they exceed the periodic time
interval plus the grace period.
4. ICCP systems, when encountering a failure during a create-dataset request, shall identify and log the specific
ICCP object(s) and nature of the problem(s) that resulted in the failure. This information shall be available at
both client and server nodes.
5. Systems shall have dynamic (on-line) database update capability in order to maintain Associations and
continuous communications with all ICCP nodes (i.e. a dataset can be updated with only those affected
associations being out of service while maintaining the remaining associations).
6. ICCP systems, when encountering a dataset mismatch, shall be configurable to automatically attempt
reconfiguration to form a dataset successfully.
7. Capability shall be provided to easily delete obsolete served data sets without impacting other data sets.
July 23, 1999
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