Digital Data Streamlines Operation & Maintenance at Translta

Introduction
TransAlta Utilities is the largest investor-owned electric utility in Canada with over 86,000 kilometers of transmission and distribution lines in a 220,000 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 has greatly enhanced corporate-wide access to our model, at minimal cost.

As we 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, ground testing and line patrol. 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 same master model, with identical views and comprehension of the represented facilities.

Future uses will expand to include Street Light Fixture and Metal Pole maintenance, Distribution Outage Statistics, and Automated Property Retirement transactions.