Operations Management via the Web: PacifiCorp’s Operations Visualization System Puts Facilities Maps on the Web
Bill Cunningham, PacifiCorp
Philip A. Naecker, Gatekeeper Systems
Introduction
PacifiCorp is one of the West’s largest utilities, with a six-state electricity service area consisting of
both urban and rural regions. In the Fall of 1997, PacifiCorp was in the midst of a major
reorganization of distribution management personnel, consolidating the trouble-call input and
management fimction from nearly 100 district offices into two call centers. As the call centers and
dispatch managers became more removed from the local dispatch operations and field personnel, a
system for distributing trouble call and related information to local workers became a critical
missing component. The Company had recently started using a new automated Distribution
Management System, but that system was not designed to be installed on hundreds of desktops over
low-speed communications lines. Even so, the re-deployment of dispatch centers was underway
and could not be delayed while technical support managers searched for a method to distribute
trouble-call data to remote field locations.
PacifiCorp’s Operations Support management responded to the urgent requirement with an
extremely aggressive project to deploy operations, customer, and outage data to every desktop in
the company. The chosen strategy was to use very lightweight and easy-to-deploy Web-based
tools, delivering active maps and dynamic access to time-critical operations data to any company
desktop that supported an Internet browser and minimal connectivity to the corporate Intranet
(Figure 1). The team also decided that they wanted to make the map a key element of the interface
to the data, allowing users of the system to navigate through the map, thematically display trouble
call information on the map, and tightly couple the map to the tabular data in the application to
Figure 1 – A Web browser-based user interface was chosen, using a map as the principal user interface
element. The map is drawn by a Web-browser plugin, Autodesk MapGuide.
The team realized that the new system could not follow the approach of many traditional GIS
systems. Although GIS data and thematic maps would be a key element of the new system, the
system could not become a “GIS System” with the typical licensing, training, complex GIS
functions, and development times of such systems. Instead, the system focus would remain on
deploying tabular data and spatial data with a map-based interface that would be as easy-to-use an
interface as could be devised. Also, it was critical that the system deliver absolutely superior
performance; slow response times typical of so many GIS systems could not be tolerated in this
application.
To display maps in the Web browser, the team chose the MapGuide product from Autodesk.
MapGuide was selected because of the ease of integrating data from multiple sources, the good
performance of the product, and the advantages of a vector-based display. In MapGuide, maps are
not just “pictures”, but consist of live objects that the user can select and can be acted on under the
control of a Java program running in the Browser.
Instead of a traditional IT development strategy involving complex requirements gathering and
analysis, project managers decided on an incremental development approach. The incremental
approach leveraged the power of the World Wide Web to provide access to the system while it was
still in development. The first version of the system was available for evaluation just six weeks
after the project began, and users were given direct input to the development team. As the
development progressed, users were able to comment on new features the same day they were
rolled out, giving excellent responses to the developments to guide the next week’s activities. The
features developed were not based on an abstract set of requirements, but on concrete data
availability and the feedback of the test user group.
