In 1983 Distrigas (Belgium), Gaz de France(France), Ruhrgas (Germany) and Gasunie (Netherlands) signed a document on a standard way of sending and receiving operational data and messages between the dispatching centers. This document was called the GASNET-Protocol. Beside the four “owners” of the protocol, another 10 companies, national and international, were using this protocol for their data exchange.
At the end of 1995 one of the users, Statoil (Norway), who experienced first problems raised by a lot of messages to handle, initiated to look for a more international standard for communication.
In May 1996 a working group was formed, in which Statoil and each of the owners was represented by one member. The first goal of this working group was to make an inventory of all the messages used, to gather them and to choose an international EDI standard.
The result of this inventory and bundling were the so called message-groups. Each message-group being a collection of a number of messages of the same type, e.g. all the request messages. For each message-group a matrix was developed containing all the fields of the messages in that group.
This matrix then made it possible to define all the messages within a message-group.
At the end of 1996 EDIFACT was chosen as the international standard to be used in the future.
The working groupselected EDS as an EDI consultant to provide support in its task to migrate the telex-based messages into EDI messages. This can be seen as the birth of Edig@s.
In 1998 version 1.0 was published with an initial set of messages. Improvements were made in the following years, new messages were added and not used ones were deprecated. In 2000 Edig@s 2.0 was published, followed 2004 by Edig@s version 3.0.
EASEE-gas as an association was founded in 2002. From this year the Edig@s working group became a part of the association.
In the following years the XML standard became more important in IT systems. It was decided to publish the next major release in 2 formats – EDIFACT syntax ISO 9735 and XML messages. In 2007 Edig@s 4 was published with improvements in the following years.
Since market requirements resulted in new messages, it was decided to cluster these messages in business processes. In 2012 the first version of Edig@s 5 was released, only in XML format with the following business processes:
- Capacity Trading
- Gas Trading
- Nomination and Matching
- Settlement
- Balancing
- Transparency
- Facility Setting
- General Service Process
In the next years several corrections and enhancements were made, including EU network codes resulting in new business processes like “REMIT” and “Market Balancing”. Input from ACER and ENTSOG was collected and included in the message documents.
Also at that time the working group decided to use a tool for the generation of all the documents including the codelists, XML-schemas and message implementation guidelines. The aim was that manually work was avoided. Enterprise Architect was chosen.
In 2015 the network code on interoperability and data exchange rules was published (NC INT by the European Commission), making Edig@s XML mandatory for document-based and for integrated data exchange.
Also in that year, the Gas Role Model taskforceof EASEE-gas was created. After several years the Edig@s message format and the Gas Role Model document were aligned to each other.
By around 2020 Edig@s 5 was used all over Europe for the previously mentioned processes.
In 2022 Edig@s 6.1 was published, offering more explicit business logic in the messages and also adding the new business process “System Operation” including more messages for Storage and LNG.