Time sensitivity is of utmost importance to the Real-Time Electricity Market (RTM) in the power trading industry since every task of the power trading has a clear completion time with a minute granularity. Any delay or failure caused therefore can have a far-reaching consequences. And that calls for cutting down on manual processes and turning power trading systems highly automated, something IEX, one of the largest power trading company in India has been trying to achieve.
“Before RTM, our Day-Ahead market segment had more time to do similar tasks. Now in RTM, we are doing that task within 15 minutes. We used to take 4 hours to perform a similar task earlier. So in essence, automation has been undertaken to concise everything together, packed within a 30-minute window. Automation undertaken includes API-based interaction with national power system operator NLDC (National Load Dispatch Center),” Sangh Gautam, Chief Technology Officer at Indian Energy Exchange Limited told ETCIO.
“Earlier, this was being done on a manual exercise, we worked very closely with the NLDC, they also provided us the API (Application Program Interface), so all the information that was earlier sent manually, was automated on an API,” Gautam said.
Integrating the API-based bidding system was one of the first innovations that they implemented on their platform. This system was also integrated with all our customers as well in order to pass on bidding information to Exchange. So, all members have the opportunity to integrate RTM bidding APIs with their internal system such that they are also able to automate the bidding process at their end for all their customers. Similarly, the system was integrated with NLDC to pass on the information of the provisional reports or results, received after the matching process, to NLDC quickly.
“This entire process was earlier manual, so now using these APIs which NLDC provided us. We were able to automate it within the system itself, so there was no manual intervention. Whatever data we are sending to API, the return value that comes to us. We look at those return values and automatically take a decision within our system. There is no manual intervention that is looking at what needs to be done,” Sangh explains the advantages of the API system for the platform.
A high-availability system is also one of the innovations that they have invested in that involves three layers of redundancy on the network layer to allow for more flexible communication between them and NLDC.
“We also created a fall-back process. So let’s say, in case, something happened to our machines or the database or connectivity within our system and we’re not able to process it, we created another separate pipeline altogether which was not dependent on our current pipeline which means that regardless of what happens to our current system, there is another system parallelly which does exactly the similar kind of work but in a different manner and it’s not dependent on a similar infrastructure or to the system on which our current system is dependent on,” Gautam added on the multi-layered redundant infrastructure of the trading platform.
IEX has also invested in an orchestration platform that enables the trading platform to orchestrate one task after another. “When we have one task after another, there needs some kind of system which is orchestrating which task to call after another, how do you pass information from one task to another, so the other task can do its job,” Gautam adds on the subject, “and the backup process that I talked about was basically creating this orchestration engine and we used Microsoft Azure service fabric,” Gautam said.
All of these processes and backup pipelines have numerous innovations and automation with them. There are self-healing mechanisms that have been created by the Exchange, which means in case of failure, the amount of manual intervention remains minimum i.e. the system recognizes the problem and automatically triggers a fall-back process.
“What we’re trying to do is, improve self-healing mechanism, and that’s where we are looking at the role of RPA (Robotic Process Automation), wherein any information that needs to be passed on to the team on any communication channels, they’re able to get this information and in case, something fails then the bot is able to take its own decisions based on the information that we have provided and automatically is able to self-heal the system,” he added on the role of RPA in the self-healing process.
With the highest market share in the RTM segment at 99%, it is important to see how IEX has automated the trading process on their platform and installed safety measures to make the process more efficient for the market participants.
With members accessing their online trading platform through multiple modes of secured connectivity such as the Multi-Protocol Label Packet Switching (MLPS) that is protected by the SSL (Secure Socket Layer).
“What SSL does is inherently it encrypts any communication that happens between the client machine to the server, so any man in the middle attack would fail because it’s an encryption that is happening right from the client side,” Mr. Gautam explained on how they manage to ensure the safety of their systems, “That is one advantage that we get, the other is that these SSL also, logins that we do, we whitelist these IPs on which people can log in, so it’s not like anyone can log in, even if you have the SSL system installed because we have whitelisted the IPs,” Gautam said.
Apart from this, they have placed strong monitoring mechanisms and password policies that they follow to ensure safety. “Also, internally there are monitoring tools where our team is continuously monitoring of all the folks who are logged in to our system, so we know from the SSL tool itself how many people are logged in,” Gautam said.
