CES International Supports Development of Critical IT and Engineering Standards for Distribution Utilities


ATLANTA, April 21, 2003 (PRIMEZONE) -- CES International announced today that Don Hall, CES International industry product manager, has been named co-chair of the task force on Distribution Outage Reporting Practices of the IEEE Power Engineering Society. The company also announced that Hannu Huhdanpaa, CES International product development manager, has been named a member of the International Electrotechnical Commission's (IEC) Technical Committee 57 (TC 57) Working Group 14 (WG 14).

Hall has been a member of the IEEE since 1986, and an active member of various task forces and working groups on distribution automation, system design and reliability indices for a number of years. He will expand his leadership role in the industry by co-chairing the task force to define standards to aid in consistent reporting practices for utilities.

The task force defines industry standards, for both current and future use, in the area of outage reporting as related to distribution reliability and the calculation of associated indices. The indices apply to distribution systems, substations, circuits and defined regions. Prior to joining CES International as a product manager in 2000, Hall spent nearly two decades in engineering and management positions with Pepco and a former subsidiary of Northern States Power, Xcel Energy.

Huhdanpaa, a 10-year CES International veteran and an expert in distributed communications, will serve on working group 14 (WG 14) of the IEC TC 57. WG 14 was formed to develop standards that facilitate application-to-application (A2A) and business-to-business (B2B) integration for electric utilities.

The standards put forth by WG 14 facilitate information exchange among systems supporting business functions for planning, constructing, maintaining and operating electric transmission and distribution (T&D) networks. CES has been continuously represented on WG 14 for over five years.

CES is also participating in the MultiSpeak(tm) initiative, an integration-standards development effort for electric cooperatives. Information on MultiSpeak is available at www.multispeak.org.

Collectively, these various standards initiatives play an important role in establishing markets because they reduce risk for suppliers and consumers of business automation solutions. These vendor-neutral information technology standards also help allow configurable and scaleable business processes.

About the IEEE

The IEEE has more than 377,000 members in approximately 150 countries. Through its members, the organization is a leading authority on areas ranging from aerospace, computers, and telecommunications to biomedicine, electric power, and consumer electronics. The IEEE produces nearly 30 percent of the world's literature in the electrical and electronics engineering, computing and control technology fields. This nonprofit organization also sponsors or cosponsors more than 300 technical conferences each year. Additional information about the IEEE can be found at http://www.ieee.org.

About the IEC

Founded in 1906, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) is the world organization that prepares and publishes international standards for all electrical, electronic and related technologies. The IEC's mission is to promote, through its members, international cooperation on all questions of electrotechnical standardization and related matters, such as the assessment of conformity to standards, in the fields of electricity, electronics and related technologies.

For more information on the International Electrotechnical Commission visit: www.iec.ch.

About CES International

CES International supplies real-time software solutions to distribution utilities on five continents, serving more than 35 million metered accounts. CES International is the developer of the Centricity operations resource management (ORM) system, which includes the market's leading outage-management system, and the newly developed Energy Delivery Management (EDM) suite of network-management software. For more information, visit www.ces.com or call 1-800-450-0266. CES International - Redefining Connectivity.

Trademarks: CES International, its 'network-sweep' logo design, and Centricity are registered trademarks of CES International.



            

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