The Utility Communications Architecture (UCA), a trademark of the Electric Power Research Institute, Inc. (EPRI), is a standards-based approach to utility communications that provides for wide-scale integration at reduced costs and solves many of the most pressing communications problems for today's utilities. Prepared under the auspices of the Profile Working Group of the MMS Forum, the UCA is designed to apply across all of the functional areas within the electric, gas, and water utilities. These functional areas include customer interface, distribution, transmission power plant, control center, and corporate information systems.

It is important to note that UCA is an architecture, rather than a simple protocol. UCA Version 2.0 incorporates a family of basic communications protocols to meet the requirements of a wide range of utility environments. The selection and organization of these protocols has been designed to provide great flexibility in choosing the appropriate technology to meet a utility's price/performance criteria, while maintaining consistency at the device and data level to reduce integration and vendor product costs.

In addition, the UCA includes detailed object models, which define the format, representation, and meaning of utility data. This modeling effort goes far beyond the scope of any other utility communications approach and provides for an unprecedented level of multi-vendor inter-opera-bility. The combination of broad scope and detailed object modeling makes the UCA specifications more complex than a typical protocol document.

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Is IEC 61850 competing with UCA 2.0? No! IEC 61850 is the solution - UCA is the brand name. Read the new two page comparison (2004-08-31; updated 2004-09-13)

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