In Europe, before the liberalization of the electricity market, most of the power plants operational information systems were "isolated" or not accessible easily from the rest of the enterprise business information system. There was no need to open them to the "outside" world of the power plant, and moreover security of power plant information system was the main concern. Since the liberalization of the electricity market, the need of accessing process data for optimisation and trading activities, as well as for e-monitoring from a centralized expertise center becomes more and more pressing. The crucial questions that arise in such context are 1) How to open power plant information systems to the "outside" world with a secure, intelligent and evolutionary interface? 2) How to continue to warranty the security of power plant information systems when they are opening for remote access to process data? 3) How to integrate and aggregate different/heterogeneous power plant information models into a common/intermediate one that may be adequate to business intelligence? 4) How to reconcile heterogeneous process data quality and to use redundant sources to make reliable information for efficient decision making? 5) How to optimise the return on investment (ROI) and ease the maintenance of existing infrastructure? 6) How to use/introduce enabling Internet/Web technologies to reduce infrastructure costs and ease interoperability? Facing such technological challenges, we propose to outline current solutions and give future directions to overcome technological barriers.
