The development of DNP3 was a comprehensive effort to achieve open, standards-based interoperability between substation outstations and master stations for the electric utility industry. Since its inception, DNP3 has also become widely utilized in adjacent industries such as water / waste water, transportation and the oil and gas industry.

In early 2010, the DNP Technical Committee began working with the IEEE to establish DNP3 as an IEEE standard; IEEE Standard for Electric Power Systems Communications – Distributed Network Protocol (DNP3) was released as IEEE Std 1815^TM-2010 later that year. This standard incorporated all of the individual “Basic 8” volumes into one document, with each “Basic 8” volume becoming a separate Clause in the 1815-2010 document.

Since then, members of the DNP Technical Committee and IEEE Power & Energy Society, Transmission and Distribution (PE/T&D) Committee and Substations Committee (PE/Sub) – Working Group C12 have been working diligently to update various sections of the DNP3 specifications.  The result is IEEE Std 1815^TM-2012, which was released Oct. 12, 2012.

The updated DNP3 standard contains many changes, including DNP3 Secure Authentication v5, which defines a protocol mechanism that enables a DNP3 outstation/master to unambiguously determine that it is communicating with the correct user/outstation.

IEEE Std 1815-2012 and the accompanying DNP3 Specification Supplement 1 - Device Profile Template and XML Schema are now available for download to DNP Users Group members from the DNP3 Document Library.