News

Open Field Message Bus Ratified as a National Standard

March 10, 2016 by Jeff Shepard

The Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) announced today that the Open Field Message Bus (OpenFMB™) was ratified as a standard through a NAESB Retail Market Quadrant member vote. OpenFMB™ provides a specification for power systems field devices to leverage a non-proprietary and standards-based reference architecture to reduce implementation complexity and integration costs.

OpenFMBâ„¢ achieves this by enabling communication between distributed intelligent nodes through loosely coupled, peer-to-peer messaging at the grid edge. Through a scalable publish-subscribe architecture, OpenFMBâ„¢ applications interact with each other and with adapters to existing end devices.

“We are pleased that through the hard work of the OpenFMBTM working committee this milestone has been met -- taking OpenFMB™ beyond a collective work to a standard,” said Aaron Smallwood, Director of Technology Operations at SGIP. “We will continue moving forward and build upon our successful demonstrations and now ratified NAESB standard to apply OpenFMB™ to more use cases and broader applications.”

The Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) is an industry consortium representing a cross-section of the energy ecosystem focusing on accelerating grid modernization and the energy Internet of Things through policy, education, and promotion of interoperability and standards to empower customers and enable a sustainable energy future. Members include utilities, vendors, investment institutions, industry associations, regulators, government entities, national labs, services providers and universities.