Outage Management Architecture Decisions at Niagara Mohawk

Introduction
Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation (NMPC) is a public-owned electric and gas utility with a service territory of 21,000 square miles reaching throughout Upstate New York. It serves 1.5 million electric and 500,000 gas customers. Its main office and computer center is located in Syracuse, New York. The geographic area spans 37 counties including 670 cities, towns and villages. A sampling of the electric facilities profile shows: 131,000 circuit miles, 2,200 feeders, 1.2 million poles and 345,000 transformers.

NMPC in 1999 will complete a three-year effort to convert data from various disjointed systems into one seamless GIS database. As data for a region is converted it is made available in production where GIS users have access to a suite of applications such as work order design, estimating, records management, etc. An extensive QAQC plan was developed to ensure network connectivity throughout the electric model down to individual customer locations. This intensive effort continues realizing this connectivity is the foundation for the Outage Management System NMPC envisions.

Niagara Mohawk, like most utilities, is under transformation with re-engineering efforts addressing the way the business can respond to the competitive marketplace. Several of the outcomes from these efforts can have a significant impact on the architecture decisions to support the Outage Management System. For instance, when performance feasibility studies were done at NMPC in early 1997 there were 4 Regional Control Centers (RCC) that managed Outages.

Central area RCC located in Syracuse.
Western area RCC located in Buffalo.
Eastern area RCC located in Albany.
Northern area RCC located in Watertown.

The plan then was to have a distributed environment with each center being capable of stand-alone operation. Since that time the Northern RCC has been closed and the management of its geographic area consolidated with the Central RCC. Now there’s strong indication that over the next two years all centers will be consolidated into the centralized location. However, a requirement surfaced that suggests 10 to 12 district offices may require access to the system during certain storms. Additionally, NMPC is planning on implementing a new Customer Information System in 1999 which is the entry point for customer trouble calls, so we need to plan on handling calls from the old and new CIS systems. So we’re seeing the Outage Management business processes demanding the need for an adaptive Outage Management technical architecture which can support the changing requirements of the business, yet integrate with the enterprisewide technical architecture.