Interfacing to outage management systems
Robert Sarfi
Convergent Group
6399 S. Fiddler's Green Circle Suite 600
Englewood, CO 80111
Introduction
With the advent of deregulation in the electric power industry, utilities find themselves preparing for
a competitive environment. The advent of deregulation and ever-demanding consumers necessitates
faster response times to perform outage restoration and reporting of outage statistics to calculate
system reliability indices. OMS or Distribution Management Systems (DMS) have reached a third
generation of maturity. First-generation systems provided little more than trouble-call sorting.
Second-generation systems associated calls with a protective device. The third generation systems are
scaleable and offer advanced functionality such as switch order generation, distribution load flow and
crew management.
When faced with implementing an OMS, a utility is often faced with the dilemma of determining
which interfaces are necessary to support their business processes. If an electronic source of data is
unavailable, the utility will find that the cost of data conversion will probably represent the most
significant project cost. Once source of data for the OMS has been resolved, the interfaces to be
considered within the scope of the OMS project must be identified. Faced with cost constraints, the
utility is faced with the prioritization of the interfaces to be developed. In order to formulate an
interface development strategy, it is important for the utility to understand the relative benefits of all
the interface types. It goes without saying that the goal should ultimately be to create a paperless
environment with one-touch data entry. A reasonable compromise of functionality and cost must be
derived. The external systems interfaced to an OMS include:
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GIS Model
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CIS Model
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CIS
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IVR
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Work Management Systems (WMS)
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Mobile Workforce Management (MWM)
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Power Monitoring Unit (PMU)
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Web-based reporting system
The objective of this presentation is to identify which interfaces are necessary in an OMS
implementation and those that should be prioritized based on operational requirements. This
presentation is divided into six sections. Section two presents a high-level system overview. Section
three presents the mandatory interfaces. Section four describes interfaces that require prioritization.
Section five presents implementation risks. Section six offers concluding remarks.
System overview
When considering the interfaces to an OMS system, at the present time most interfaces are executed
in a traditional point-to-point fashion. Figure 1 identifies the types of interfaces typically associated
with an OMS implementation. It is important to note that Figure 1 is a generic diagram and is
independent of the technical specifics of the implementation.
Figure 1: OMS Interfaces
