Development of a Web Service Based Information Exchange Platform for the Nigerian Deregulated Electricity Market

This work developed a Web service based Information Exchange Platform (WIEP) for effective business operations among generation, transmission and distribution utilities in the Nigerian deregulated electricity market. Object-oriented methodology and multi-tenant architecture were used to design and implement the components (GUI, database and messaging server) of the WIEP. While the GUI was implemented using various object attributes, the database, messaging server and application logic that connected the components were implemented using SQL, SOAP and C# programming language respectively. The developed system was tested on shared and dedicated servers to examine its performance (response time and throughput). The GUI, database and messaging server were functional when tested. The platform’s response time gave linear trend on shared and dedicated servers respectively whereas the throughput produced linear and near-exponential trends respectively on shared and dedicated servers. The developed platform if adopted will improve electric power management in Nigeria when deregulation is fully operational.