· Evaluation of a technologies use in what IntelliGrid Architecture team sees as the direction of technology in general. Specifically the team sees Web based technologies as increasing in use. Key technologies moving forward include

o Web Services related technologies

o Model/ontology enabled technologies

o Open technologies.

It should be noted that IntelliGrid Architecture team believes that selecting individual technologies as recommended ones is not beneficial to the industry. Rather, IntelliGrid Architecture team believes that it is better to put forward a technology independent architecture as well as examples of how it might be implemented using existing technologies. Consequently, the technology discussion in this section should not be seen as singling out technologies as the ones that utilities should use, but only as providing a structure and strategy with which utilities may make their own choices.

Each of the five technology area subsections contains three parts:

· Technology analysis/evaluation

· Technology integration

· Analysis of gaps, overlaps, and harmonization efforts.

Detail analysis/evaluation of technology actually appears in appendices. This section is limited to conclusions and key points uncovered during technology analysis. That is, this section only contains a discussion of the capabilities of a few key technologies as well as an overview of a comparative analysis of current widely used ones.

The technology integration section deals with integration issues related to the mixed use of widely used technologies. It is anticipated that most utilities will have a non-uniform approach to the application of technology even for a similar set of requirements. Consequently, it is important to describe how a uniform architecture can be built in spite of this heterogeneity.

The third part contains a description of the identified gaps, overlaps and inconsistencies among the technologies and standards as well as an overview of harmonization efforts occurring in the relevant standard organizations.

As describe above, the reader needs to be aware that different technologies are applicable to different environments. For example, the device level security will likely require different technologies than the enterprise level security.