Intelligent Information Systems’ Development Strategies for Power Systems Planning: Deregulation and the Internet as Key Factors

The paper briefly discusses past practices in developing knowledge-based information systems so-called Knowledge Systems (KS) in the electric power industry (EPI), pointing out some emerging success factors and constraints in their deployment e.g. lack of integration on the standardization front, and the need for Business Process Modeling (BPM) and in many cases for Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) as a foundation for an architecturedriven strategy with strong "end-user integration", as opposed to past functionality-driven and stand-alone strategies. The effects of deregulation and competition on the EPI, combined with the emergence of the Internet/WorldWide-Web (WWW), E-Commerce, and the emergence of E-Utilities:web-based power utility companies (PUC) which are mainly Power Marketers (PM)), and their roles in changing the traditional business processes in the EPI including apparent deviations and/or convergence between developed and developing countries are briefly discussed. A cross-section of present modeling and development paradigms e.g. object-orientation (OO) and agentorientation (AO) -, relevant standards and standardization efforts are discussed, followed by an introduction of work on a simple web-enabled prototype Decision Support System (DSS) for Electric Power System (EPS) outage planning. Key-Words: Power System Planning, Knowledge Systems, Deregulation, E-Commerce, E-Utilities