scope:

This document specifies a protocol for Energy Management Agents (EMAs) to facilitate communications among these agents for demand response (DR) energy management applications. The EMA protocol (EMAP) provides a logical connection among EMAs in community housing such as an apartment building or a campus of houses or apartment buildings. The EMAP also specifies interaction procedures and message formats for DR energy management as introduced in ISO/IEC 15067-3-3. The EMAP supports interactions among EMAs at OSI (Open System Interconnection) layer 7 with a message transfer protocol. An EMA may be embedded in devices such as a thermostat, a smart appliance, or other consumer products. The choice of interconnection depends on the system and the network topology, which may be arranged in a mesh or hierarchical tree structure. An intermediate EMA may relay messages sent between EMAs. Note: The application message set that uses the EMAP OSI layer 7 is not part of the protocol specification in this document. It is part of the EMA above OSI layer 7. The application message set can use the ISO/IEC 14543 series, ISO/IEC 10192-3, IEC 62541 and IEC 30118. Note: This document facilitates utility-based DR programs, but does not mandate such programs. Consumers may choose to provide electricity using DER locally with a house, an apartment complex, a community, or a microgrid without any connection to a public utility. Note: In a residential microgrid data such as DR messages and price signals can be issued by an energy management system or an EMA for scheduling, forecasting functions, etc. to optimize energy consumption/generation without relying on a public utility.