Welcome to GADS Open Source™ Support!

GADS/OS Data Entry and GADS/OS Analysis & Reporting give generating companies tools to take control of their mandatory GADS reporting to NERC and the various ISOs.

GADS/OS is a set of free and open source software tools and is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 2 (GNU GPL or simply GPL) which is the most widely used free software license.

Solomon Associates has transferred their GADS NxL software, including the source code, to the GADS Open Source Project. Therefore, the project starts off with fully functional and exhaustively field tested software for you to download and install … all with no licensing or maintenance fees. Support Plan options are described on the Support menu under Support Plans.

GADS/OS is already in use at a wide range of generating companies from single-plant sites to larger generating companies with hundreds of generating units.

Our latest count shows that the GADS/OS code base is being used to collect and analyze data on more than 200 companies and 3,800 generating units both domestically and internationally. The user interface is available in both English and español.

GADS Open Source™ is coded to comply with the standards, definitions and rules specified:

  • by NERC in the GADS Data Reporting Instructions (DRI) and the NERC GADS data validation specifications, and
  • by the ISO New England, the New York ISO, the PJM Interconnection, and the Midwest ISO.

GADS Open Source™ can generate validated data files to upload/submit to NERC and the ISO/RTOs.

Users wishing to change (customize) calculations, definitions, reports, etc may do so by downloading a copy of the source code. They may modify their copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it as long as they comply with the GNU GPL "Terms And Conditions For Copying, Distribution And Modification".

Customization assistance is available as described on the Support menu under Custom Services.

Using the most current industry-standard Microsoft® Visual Basic.NET, ASP.NET, and C# languages and software development tools with the corporate standard database management systems of Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000/2005/2008, and Oracle Database 9i/10g/11g enables our software to provide reliable and scalable solutions regardless of current or future operating systems—including the 64-bit Windows operating systems.

  • GADS/OS Data Entry

    GADS/OS Data Entry allows you to collect and report validated GADS performance data and event data (including outage, derating, non-curtailing, and reserve shutdown events plus special synchronous condensing and pumping operation event types) in standard formats required by NERC GADS and all major ISOs.

    GADS data is collected for all major generating unit components—such as the boiler, nuclear reactor, heat recovery steam generator (HRSG), combustion turbine/jet engine, steam turbine, and generator—and other plant systems, subsystems, and components.

  • GADS/OS Analysis & Reporting

    GADS/OS Analysis & Reporting allows you to calculate industry-standard performance measures for reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM) assessments and key performance indicators (KPIs) using the GADS data for your generating units as the basis for those calculations.

    Measures of generating unit performance — such as Availability Factor (AF), Equivalent Availability Factor (EAF), Forced Outage Rate (FOR), Equivalent Forced Outage Rate (EFOR), and Starting Reliability — have been defined, recorded, and utilized by the electric power industry for more than 50 years. The statistics can be calculated with and without OMC events from granularities as fine as hourly and daily to as coarse as yearly or longer.

    In addition to the 47 standard built-in reports, you can also add user-created reports built with SAP's Crystal Reports to the Analysis & Reporting reports list and run them from within the Program. Exporting to Excel is built into the Program and is always available to create simple, as well as easy, ad hoc reports.

    Analysis & Reporting not only calculates these important standard measures, but also includes measures such as the Equivalent Demand Forced Outage Rate (EFORd) used in UCAP/ICAP calculations that have been developed to respond to the deregulated capacity and energy markets.

    EFORd - Equivalent Demand Forced Outage Rate (EFORd) was added to IEEE Standard 762 in 2006. However, this equation has been used by the PJM Interconnection and the Canadian Electricity Association (CEA) for many years. It is not used by all ISO organizations as a measure of reliability and dependability. NERC GADS started calculating this number about 10 years ago and it was added to our software and other reports at that time. NERC GADS follows the IEEE 762 formula for calculating EFORd.

With more than 25 years of GADS data reporting experience, this expertise ensures that you are getting the best GADS software tools available anywhere.

Recommended Implementation

GADS/OS can currently be installed as a Windows-client application on individual user machines or on a network (shared) drive. In mid-year 2012, you will also be able to install a WPF browser application and you will be able to install just one or both of these implementations depending on your company's individual needs.

The NERC GADS mandatory report states that GADS data is due 30 days after each quarter years (i.e., April, July, October, and January). This will be the rule starting the second quarter of 2012 but not for the first quarter (January-March 2012). NERC has extended the reporting of Q1 data. They will start collecting Q1 GADS data on April 24th and will continue to collect through June 24, 2012. According to the email issued by Mike Curley, Manager of NERC's GADS Services, dated April 21, 2012: "We are all on a learning curve and the extra time will allow all of us to gather, test and learn to upload your data to the webE-GADS website. ... In the beta testing, we had to upload the data several times because of errors in the data."

While we are not aware of any issues related to the GADS Open Source software, this initial uploading of GADS data may result in new/changed requirements from NERC/OATI to ASCII file formats, to data validations, to required data fields, etc. We may be required to make GADS Open Source code revisions between April 24th and June 24th to address any changes.

As a result of possibly having to make coding changes at the same time we are releasing a new upgrade version, we have reluctantly delayed the release of the WPF standalone and XBAP versions until after the end of the initial NERC/OATI data collection (June 24, 2012). Therefore, we expect to release these versions in July 2012.

WPF XAML browser applications (XBAPs) combine features of both Web applications and Windows rich-client applications. Like Web applications, XBAPs can be deployed to a Web server and started from Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, or Firefox.

To learn more about the GADS Open Source Project visit http://gadsos.codeplex.com/.

You can learn more about GADS by downloading the GADS Data Reporting Instructions - Complete Version at NERC.


The GADS Open Source Project is a member of the Data, Languages, and Systems Interoperability gallery of the Outercurve Foundation.

The Outercurve Foundation is a non-profit organization which provides a framework to facilitate the participation of corporate software developers in open source projects, either through intellectual property contributions to the foundation or through time volunteered under the auspices of the foundation to enable development work on open source projects.


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This code is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 2.
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