Challenge
Greece’s Independent Power Transmission Operator (IPTO) needed an advanced digital solution to enhance the efficiency and transparency of the real-time balancing energy market. The existing data processing methods were time-consuming, prone to inconsistencies, and lacked the robustness required for handling large-scale transactions in a dynamic energy market. IPTO sought to develop a secure, automated, and high-performing application to address these inefficiencies, ensuring compliance with regulatory frameworks and enabling market participants to operate more effectively.
The development of the RTBMU application for IPTO faced several key challenges:
- Data Transformation and Integration: The application must handle large volumes of time-series data from CSV files available via SFTP, requiring complex transformations, mapping, and storage into a database. Ensuring the correct transformation logic and efficient processing of data is a significant challenge.
- Complex Business Logic and Validation: The application must follow intricate business rules and validations, such as ensuring data consistency with respect to time changes (e.g., daylight saving time) and accurately managing business exceptions. This will require careful design of error handling and logging mechanisms to ensure proper auditing and transparency.
- Security and Access Control: Implementing security measures, such as OpenID Connect and OAuth2, along with access control for different roles within the system, is crucial.
- System Integration and CI/CD: Ensuring smooth integration with the IPTO’s existing systems and incorporating the developed application into a CI/CD pipeline for seamless deployment and testing across development and production environments is complex.
- Testing and Documentation: Comprehensive testing, including unit and integration tests, and thorough documentation of the APIs and system configurations are necessary to ensure reliability and ease of maintenance.
Real-time energy data processing, redefined—enhancing transparency, accuracy, and efficiency in Greece’s electricity market.
Approach
To address these challenges, a structured Agile development approach was followed to handle the tasks below:
- Frontend Development: Built using React 19.x and the NX build framework, the application strictly adhered to the UI/UX guidelines provided by the client.
- Testing: Cypress was utilized for end-to-end testing, ensuring functionality and stability. Documentation was maintained in Confluence and ReadMe files for future reference and system enhancements.
- DevOps & CI/CD: Jenkins Pipelines were used to implement continuous integration and delivery flows, ensuring the application is deployed to both Development and Production environments.
- SFTP Integration: Spring batch was used to handle the batch processing of the files.
Results & Impact
The project was successfully completed on time and is currently in active used by IPTO. The deployment of RTBMU transforms market operations by ensuring faster, more reliable, and secure processing of market data. This enhances transparency, supports compliance, and enables energy market participants to operate more effectively in a rapidly evolving landscape.
Through this initiative, IPTO has reinforced its ability to manage real-time balancing energy data efficiently, marking a significant step in modernizing Greece’s electricity market infrastructure.
