Palo Alto (News - Alert), California-based WSO2, a global enterprise middleware developer, announced on December 13 that Chengdu, China-based Dongfang Electronics Co. Ltd, an international power station contractor, is using the open source WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (WSO2 ESB) to streamline the development and maintenance of smart power grids. Dongfang relies on WSO2 ESBs to loosely couple the systems in its smart power grids – eliminating the cost and complexity of using proprietary connections.

An enterprise service bus (ESB) is middleware that monitors and controls the routing of message exchange between services, including message and event queuing and sequencing, security or exception handling, and protocol conversion. WSO2 ESB is designed to meet the demands of high-volume service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementations.

A new Dongfang case study from WSO2 describes how the company has used WSO2 ESBs as part of the service-oriented architecture that supports its next-generation smart power grid solutions, some of which are delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)).

The smart grid solutions require the integration of multiple systems for information management, supervisory control, and geographic data, among others. Additionally, they need to adhere to industry standards. These include IEC 61968 for information exchanges between electrical distribution systems and IEC 61970 for energy management system application programming interfaces (APIs).

Faced with these demands, Dongfang determined that the best approach would be to deploy open source ESBs within a service-oriented architecture (SOA). This would enable the systems within the smart power grid to be loosely coupled, eliminating the cost and complexity of implementing proprietary connections. Dongfang then evaluated the capabilities of WSO2 ESB along with two other popular open source ESBs.

“We selected WSO2 ESB because it provides the most flexibility and extensibility among the ESBs we evaluated,” recalled Yanle Liu, Dongfang systems architect. “We also liked that WSO2 ESB is easy to use and deploy. Not only can we utilize the user friendly Web management console; we also can create a custom client user interface based on the Web service interface.”

He added, “In the beginning, we mainly used WSO2 ESB for system integration. However, based on our initial success, WSO2 ESB soon became a complete platform for our solutions. This has allowed us to take advantage of the widespread adoption of SOA and Web services to enhance our existing products and newer SaaS offerings.”

“With nearly 30 years of power management experience, Dongfang Electronics is an innovator in delivering solutions that can be readily adapted to support dynamic energy markets worldwide,” said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, founder and CEO of WSO2. “We are excited by Dongfang’s success in using our WSO2 ESB to provide secure, adaptable state-of-the-art smart power grid solutions that take advantage of the latest advances in open source, SOA, and cloud deployment.”

As a 100 percent open-source solution released under the Apache License 2.0, WSO2 ESB does not carry any licensing fees. WSO2 offers a range of additional service and support options, including evaluation support, a special QuickStart consulting program, development support, and production support.