40 Years Ago I Started Contributing To The MAP/MMS Standardization In Detroit (MI)

I have contributed to the MAP/MMS Standardization (Manufacturing Automation Protocols/Manufacturing Message Specification) from the very beginning. I was working for Siemens in the group dealing with communication solutions for process control and factory automation. In February 1985 I attended the first time a meeting of the MAP project at the GM TechCenter in Warren (Michigan, USA). As you can see, the first day was a very cold day (1985-02-14) with a lot of fresh snow:

I looked still young (40 years younger than today) ... 32 years old and father of four children.

The approach of MAP/MMS was very new ... even today a lot of people have difficulties with MMS ... especially because of using ASN.1 BER as the encoding notation for all messages exchanged according to IEC 61850 - Client/Server and Publisher/Subscriber messages!!

In 1993 I got also involved in the new IEC TC 57 project TASE.2 (Telecontrol Application Service Element 2) based on MMS ... called ICCP (Intercontrol Center Communication Protocol):

I attended the following meeting in Loveland (Colorado, USA):

30 years ago (March 1995) the IEC TC 57 decided to start a new project: IEC 61850 based on the EPRI UCA 2.0 Specification ... also using MMS/ASN.1/BER ... I got involved in UCA and IEC 61850 starting with the second IEC TC 57 WG 10 meeting end of 1995.

Many people in the electrical power world have complained since then that MMS/ASN.1/BER is toooo ... too much of ... and as a result many have departed from the approach.

I have suggested many times to use web services ... JSON encoding instead of ASN.1/BER and XML ... most people ignored the use of web services ... I guess it will come in the near future.

In many of the following standardization groups I have supported modern communication approaches ... in some cases it took some time ... or still is awaiting for a push:

Object Modeling in the late 1980s - Too Early!

One of the crucial aspects of the standard series IEC 61850 is about object modeling ... first versions have been published in the year 2004 ... guess you agree!

Did you know that object modeling for process automation was already defined to some degree in the late 1980s for the standard ISO/IEC 9506-6 (MMS Companion Standard for Process Control) - published in the year 1994? Maybe you are surprised ... you may even have been born after that time ... 

The other day I have documented the following example of supervision of rate change of a process measurement:

On the bottom the MMS Named Variable C_PVRCPAP is shown. The semantic (setting for a specific event) is equivalent to the "Temperature rate alarm trigger level setting" of the LN class STMP in IEC 61850-7-4 Ed2.1. The definition in MMS part 6 is generic and applies to any measurement.

I would say that the MMS companion standard ISO/IEC 9506-6 was some 30 years too early published ... mainly due to the fact that many engineers did not understand abstract object modeling. 

History repeats itself, which is good because most people don't pay attention the first time anyway.

And today? Hope you have a better understanding! In case you need help ... let me know.

The semantic of the huge amount of signals in IEC 61850 or the few in the old ISO/IEC 9506-6 make the difference compared to most protocols like IEC 60870-5-104 and ...