ENTSOG Annual Report 2016

IT and Reasearch & Development Activities

IT Activities

EVALUATE MAINTENANCE PDWS/TP

Various and significant evolutions were delivered in order to continuously improve the performance and functionality of the Transparency Platform (TP). Notably, a major upgrade of the TP database version signif- icantly improved the querying performance for the TP users. A features requested by several users was added, enabling them to download the data directly in Excel; another feature was delivered to give users the choice between download- ing capacity and interruption data in a compact mode (as few distinct values as possible) or in a “periodized” mode (one value per gas day, or per gas hour). The Project Data Portal evolved significantly to cope with the TYNDP 2017 data collection, as well as with the PCI appli- cation collection. A major revision of the project portal was necessary to be in line with the TYNDP 2017 data collection. Improvements were done along several axes. The layout was improved and made more user-friendly; unnecessary questions were re- moved, and new ones were added; usage of tool tips and explanatory texts was systematized. A significant effort was spent to document the project por- tal, resulting in the production of an exhaustive handbook. ENTSOG provided regular support during the data collec- tion to assist project promoters in their submission. STANDARDISATION AND AUTOMATISATION OF URGENT MARKET MESSAGES (UMM) Work on the standardisation of UMMs continued. ENTSOG IT analysed the documents produced by ACER, and partic- ipated to a series of webinars tackling the implementation. The second half of 2016 was spent addressing the docu- ments produced by ACER, and analysing in detail the consequences for ENTSOG. Functional questions were discussed and documented via Question and Answers doc- IMPROVEMENT DATA PORTAL

Collecting feedback and evaluating the user experience of the TP has always been an objective of ENTSOG, and this is why the possibility to ask directly questions to the TP Administrative team was added to the TP. This feature has since been regularly used. A less visible but nonetheless very real achievement led to a quite significant improvement of the system’s loading performance, i.e. the time needed to process and display the data on the Platform. The TP is now performing quite well under the current conditions.

One important goal of ENTSOG was to give the promoters the tools to understand how their data was processed, in order to react rapidly and gain a better understanding of the way ENTSOG processes such inputs. A comprehensive set of reports was produced and integrated in the project portal interface, giving promoters a better insight into the inner workings of ENTSOG’s data warehouse. Overall, the efforts paid off, enabling to collect data more quickly and in a bet- ter quality than before. Another round of targeted improvements was delivered end of 2016. ENTSOG agreed to support the European Commis- sion in collecting PCI applications for the PCI Third List. The project portal was adapted to this goal; the documentation was updated, and two webinars were held. Here also, the data collection was a success, completing in little more than a month.

uments. The discussions on the UMMs standardisation and automatisation is continuing in 2017. Both via special ACER-ENTSOG-TSO stakeholder webinars and in the RRM User Group.

ENTSOG Annual Report 2016 |

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