Outage Management Architecture Decisions at Niagara Mohawk

Outage System Requirements
The NMPC Business Requirements outlined performance and technical criteria for the Outage System. NMPC has chosen an Outage Management package where certain technical criteria were included with the functionality of the product. The rest of the criteria would be dependent on factors within the NMPC environment such as interfacing with the Customer Information System. The following requirements focus on those that are pertinent in considering the technical architecture for implementing the system.

Business Requirements
The system needs to provide the capability for assignments of dispatchers within Dispatch Areas by geographic location with the ability to easily shift a dispatcher from one area to another. Additionally, if one of the regional control centers operations is lost another center can take over dispatching for the lost center dispatch areas. In certain storms the system must be made available to district offices. The system will provide customer outage feedback information to the Customer Information System.

Performance Requirements
Many Outage Management Systems are hobbled by the time to build and manage updates for the dynamic electric model required for an Outage System from a relatively static GIS model. This system must be able to manage incremental updates from GIS on a nightly basis without interrupting work on an active Outage. Other performance considerations include:

The prediction engine processing 30,000 trouble calls per hour from the CIS interface.
Graphics rendering and screen redraws must be fast enough so as not to impact dispatcher performance.
100 switching operations per hour.
1,000 dispatch requests per hour.

Technical Requirements
Being a mission critical system, the ability to provide a Highly Available 7 X 24 operation is critical. This would include automatic detection of background process failures, such as the process that retrieves trouble tickets from CIS. Additionally, the system is required to run the NT Operating System with dual-head monitors on the client-side. This is a must to integrate with the NMPC desktop strategy.

Requirements Analysis
The outage package NMPC selected met the requirements that were attributed to its functionality. Based on some feasibility tests the vendor felt a distributed architecture would satisfi the performance requirements and also provide multiple stand-alone environments that would offer built-in redundancy if a site were lost. For example, if a WAN link was lost to a site it could continue to operate.

As NMPC IT reviewed the requirements and suggested architecture several issues arose as to the cost and deviation from our current technical architecture that would be required to implement the distributed architecture. Although, two years ago we envisioned implementing the distributed environment our thinking changed as we examined the changing business and what our current infrastructure could support. We felt the package was flexible enough for us to consider a centralized environment approach, which would meet the business requirements and leverage our existing infrastructure and tool sets.