Black Hills Corp. (BHC; Rapid City, South Dakota, U.S.) has awarded Open Systems International Inc. (www.osii.com) a contract to supply common, state-of-the-art SCADA, energy management system and distribution management system platforms serving three of its subsidiaries, Black Hills Power, Black Hills Energy and Cheyenne Light Fuel & Power.

BHC is an investor-owned energy utility that provides electric and gas services to approximately 759,000 customers across South Dakota, Colorado, Montana, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and Wyoming.

To increase its operational efficiency, BHC will implement and utilize networked systems from OSI at its two reliability centers in Rapid City and Pueblo, Colorado. Benefits of all subsidiary utilities employing common OSI technology include reduced maintenance and support costs, reduced regulatory compliance efforts and costs, simplified training, shared emergency backup operations facilities and the option for shared resources.

OSI's monarch (Multi-platform Open Network ARCHitecture) technology is replacing EFACEC/Advanced Control Systems' legacy master control system at Black Hills Power. In addition, Black Hills Energy's current OSI system is being updated to the latest revision of the OSI monarch platform.

Standard capabilities of the modern monarch architecture will be employed so that each system may serve as a Backup Control Center for the other.

The proposed systems are based on OSI's innovative monarch distributed open architecture and include Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, Historical Information, Calculation and Trending subsystems, Automatic Generation Control, Disturbance Data Collection, Distribution Mapping and Dispatch operations (interfaced to OATI Scheduler and Smallworld GIS), Advanced Transmission Applications (Topology Processor, Power Flow, State Estimator and Contingency Analysis) as well as ICCP, DNP and LG8979 communications. The systems will be based on OSI's latest .NET Graphical User Interface technology.