The IEC Technical Committee 57 (Working Group 03) have developed part 6 to provide a communication profile for sending basic telecontrol messages between two systems which is compatible with ISO standards and ITU-T recommendations.
[1] These standards include: A typical national power grid includes a hierarchy of control centres to manage the generation, transmission, and distribution of power throughout the grid: Prior to the development of electronics and telecommunications networks all co-ordination between control centres was carried out by telephone.
Initially individual SCADA manufacturers developed their own proprietary "closed" protocols for communicating from a control centre to electrical equipment in the field.
Inter-utility real time data exchange has become critical to the operation of interconnected systems in most parts of the world.
Historically there has been reliance on custom or proprietary links and protocols to exchange real time data between systems.
ICCP began as an effort to develop an international standard for real-time data exchange within the electric power utility industry.
Once an ICCP link is established, the contents of the Bilateral Tables in the server and client provide complete control over what is accessible to each party.
Extensive interoperability testing between products of some of the major vendors has been a feature of ICCP protocol development.
Application profiles for the ICCP client and server conformances must match if the link is to operate successfully.
Similarly failover and redundancy schemes and the way the SCADA responds to ICCP requests is not a protocol issue so is not specified.
This configuration offers maximum performance because of the direct access to the SCADA database without requiring any intervening buffering.
On the application interface side the ICCP is not restricted to the SCADA environment but is open to other systems such as a separate data historian or other databases.
Security may be easier to manage with the ICCP server segregated from the operational real time systems.