AM/FM goes Mobile at Transalta
Pat Drinnan AM/FM Coordinator Transmission & Distribution Services TransAlta Utilities Corporation PO Box 1900 Calgary, Alberta T2P-2M Brian Gillespie AM/FM IT Agent Transmission & Distribution Services PO Box 1900 Calgary, Alberta T2P-2M1
Introduction
TransAlta Utilities is the largest investor-owned electric utility in Canada with over 86,000 kilometers of transmission and distribution lines in a 248,000 square kilometer service area. The AM/FM System models TransAlta’s entire electrical network, in both graphical and pure data representations, with true connectivity. It links installed distribution and transmission facilities (155,000 transformers, 700,000 conductor segments and over 1 million poles, among others), to actual geographical and customer information, within this integrated model. Our AM/FM model contains over 24Gb of electronic corporate information. In our ongoing pursuit of increased operating efficiency, our investigations confirmed that there was a fundamental set of work-steps in all field maintenance operations, which could be elegantly supported by an appropriately-configured viewer / red-liner application, in the hands of our field staff at their worksites. As with many industries performing field operation, inspection and maintenance routines, we were spending far too much time and money on repeatedly translating basic sets of information across a variety of media (paper to paper, paper to digital to paper). Delivery of our enhanced viewer/ red-liner application significantly leveraged TransAlta’s existing investment in it’s AM/FM model, since this relatively small development effort resulted in the delivery the whole AM/FM model and the value of it’s embedded information, to several hundred field staff and centralized Dispatchers. The viewer / red-liner implementation provides an economical solution to our need for enterprise-wide access to the master AM/FM model, in both connected and disconnected viewing modes. Many departments of the company are making increased use of the master AM/FM model for business analysis and decision-support. The Mobile AM/FM viewer would greatly enhance corporate-wide access to our model, at minimal cost. As we will explain, this delivery of corporate information and workflow support in an electronic medium, has had a tremendous positive impact, in terms of reductions in many areas, such as cycle times, printing, plotting, data translation, and facility checking. We chose a commercially-available Viewer/ Red-liner application from Intergraph called FRAMME Field View. This product was enhanced and customized to support a set of specific business workflow requirements for TransAlta’s Network Operations field staff. The enhanced viewer now provides some of the functionality of a FRAMME model, directly into the hands of field staff at job sites remote from the master model. Our delivery included powerful search tools, display controls, intelligent redline features, support for Pole inspections, new service layouts, and vegetation management. Mobile AM/FM will be further enhanced in the near future, to support additional workflows that contain the defined fundamental work-steps. The delivered product supports data capture directly in the context of the master model, rather than in some interim raw form that would require further translation and linkage-setting. This is a significant departure from most field data capture approaches, which generally use an alpha-numeric input to data-logger devices, with no visible relationship to the pictorial records of the facilities. Our approach results in all users working directly within the = master model, with identical views and comprehension of the represented facilities. Future uses will expand to include Street Light Fixture and Metal Pole maintenance, Ground Test and Maintenance, Line Patrols (Overhead and Underground), and increased support for more detailed layouts and cost estimates / quotes for New Services. Project Methodology 1- Select a Viewer / Red-liner A~plication TransAlta was determined to do as little development work as possible. Our corporate I.T. policy is “buy, don’t build”. We explored the market for an application that would have a suite of “out of the box” capabilities to meet our base-line requirements:
2- Load the Entire AM/FM Model into the Viewer Environment TransAlta was determined to provide as much of the master AM/FM data to the field as possible. We expect that having ~ available facility, customer, and land records visible at the work site will be of high value to end users. This availability should reduce the effort previously spent on inter-personal fact-checking, transcription, translation, and time delays. It should also begin to build a sense of personal “ownership” of correct records in the minds of the field staff, since not only can they see errors immediately, but for the first time, they can input corrections to those records at source, using the condition and arrangement of the actual facilities as their guide. TransAlta provides ~ master graphics and database records to the Mobile AM/FM user, along with full review capabilities of the feature attributes and graphics definitions. The field user has as much access to AM/FM model records as a FRAMME user in the office. 3- Enhance the Viewer Application To Suit Our Workflows TransAlta’s main goal in enhancing the commercial viewer application was to eliminate or reduce the human effort of translating “dumb” redlines into intelligent AM/FM features. We set out to develop definitions for certain features, within the viewer application, that would be a subset of our main AM/FM model features. We chose several of the most-used AM/FM features, representing the most common new facilities, and then chose their most critical attributes as the ones to be dealt with by our field users, An example would be our transformer feature, which has over a dozen attributes in AM/FM. The Mobile AM/FM version of this feature was configured with just 4 crucial fields, but all of these redline fields will upload back to the AM/FM master. The crucial redline attributes are sufficient to drive the field-relationship automation (logic) in the master model, which will then auto-fill many of the other AM/FM master attribute fields, without requiring user intervention. 4- Provide a Powerful Tool-kit for the Field User TransAlta ensured that the field staff would have a high degree of ease-of-use in the Mobile AM/FM application. We knew that the worst thing to do would be to overwhelm these new users with intricacies and difficult navigation techniques. To achieve this goal, we delivered:
TransAlta was determined to reduce or eliminate much of the human effort required to translate typical redline field markups into AM/FM master records. This was achieved by automatically transforming the individual rows of redline data related to a new or existing feature, into a format understood by FRAMME as a feature definition. The result is that the intelligent redline feature is presented within a FRAMME graphics session as a PP_ state feature. The AM/FM operator then audits, edits, connects, and commits this new data to the master. Achievements TransAlta believes that it has achieved a number of significant breakthroughs in it’s implementation of Mobile AM/FM, along with major innovations in work practice efficiency. We believe that some of our innovations might even be “first in the world”. 1- Intelligent Redline Features TransAlta enhanced a commercially-available viewer / red-liner application to deliver intelligent redline features which are functionally equivalent to FRAMME features. This allows the creation or editing of AM/FM model master records in the field, at the very beginning of our workflows, remote from the master model. This is very much like having the power of FRAMME itself, made available in the field on low-cost computers, at the actual site of work in progress. The redline feature intelligence mimics the FRAMME paradigm of database records linked to graphic elements, placed into a geographic fabric with proper spatial relationships to land-base and existing facility records. Many of our redline feature symbols have been crafted to match with those in the AM/FM model, for the sake of continuity and understanding by our users. Our intelligent redline features reappear within AM/FM graphics worksets as PPA-state FRAMME features. 2- Automated Upload/ Translation of Redline Data into AM/FM Model TransAka achieved significant increases in efficiency, by inventing new data flows:
TransAlta’s mobile AM/FM system was built to support work steps that are fundamental to all facility construction, maintenance or operations, regardless of the type of facility or type of activity involved:
TransAlta now provides field staff with more functionality and information than ever before, directly accessible at their work sites, in their vehicles, and throughout their workflows:
TransAlta’s original business case, and subsequent proven experience, show that the benefits flowing from our investment in an enhanced viewer / redliner application delivery are sufficient to justify the original expense, and to provide impetus for further rollouts of Mobile AM/FM technology. 1- Labor Savhws
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