The tender for the Damas Upgrade was published in early 2021. Unicorn’s proposal was chosen as the winner, and after several rounds of online negotiations due to COVID19 travel restrictions, we eventually signed the contract on 17 August.
The original Damas in Transelectrica was developed a decade ago and was starting to hit the walls of its usability to meet the challenges faced by TSOs across Europe today. This negative situation was even boosted thanks to the fact that Damas Transelectrica covers almost all areas of the TSO’s responsibilities, making it one of the most complex implementations of the Damas MMS system in Europe from the very beginning.
The Damas Upgrade project brings Transelectrica the newest version of the Damas MMS:E, based on the latest technologies, assuring system compliance with the modern pan-European platforms and long-term system’s use of operation and extendibility. Unicorn Systems has an extensive knowledge of energy industry standards and is keen to apply innovations and design smart solutions. With this in mind, Unicorn clients receive solutions with the highest possible value-added, simplifying, accelerating, and streamlining their business processes. To develop software quickly, reliably, and securely, we’ve been continuously building and using the Unicorn Application Framework (UAF), which provides the foundation upon which Unicorn builds all of its products. The new Damas MMS:E for Transelectrica was also built on the UAF.
Technology and business upgrade challenges
The Damas Transelectrica Upgrade is a complete system now rebuilt on new, modern technologies and cloud operation, 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 throughout the Czech Republic (e.g., Pilsen, Písek, Prague). Because 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, can run autonomously (if needed).
The whole system comprises of the following business domains, which, in some cases, needed to be rebuilt to face new energy domain transformation challenges:
- Balancing – the Balancing module has been rebuilt to allow Transelectrica to locally manage its power grid stability (i.e., based on the balancing offers submitted solely on the Romanian market), and now also by offers activated at the Pan-European balancing platforms MARI, TERRE, PICASSO).
- Ancillary Services – the rebuilt module covered the configuration for the 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. In other words, 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 the core region. Generally, the module provides users with:
- Long-term, Day-ahead, Intra-day Explicit auctions operated by TSO, JAO
- Day-ahead Implicit auctions operated as a part of the 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
Unlimited publishing
Transelectrica is a state-owned organisation under the surveillance of the Romanian regulatory authority and is a member of ENTSO-E. As such, Transelectrica needs to be transparent. This is where the new Damas MMS:E and its features provide support:
- Public screens accessible without authentication/authorisation
- MS Excel reports on-demand and regularly generated
- Supports data downloads in common file formats, e.g., PDF, CSV, XLSX
Reliable operation
Due to the complexity of the whole Transelectrica Damas MMS:E solution, Unicorn and Transelectrica worked together meticulously to develop Damas MMS:E , and we reached the newest Damas MMS:E version and successfully deployed it on the production environment in 2024. However, Unicorn support continues to provide the post “go-live” maintenance as a 24/7 service, including:
- regular maintenance meetings,
- operation monitoring and preventive vulnerability scanning,
- maintenance support.
