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An application view of integrating Geospatial technology for utilities
Keith E. McDaniel
Executive Director,
Strategic Planning - Utilities
10499 Bradford Road
Littleton, Colorado 80127
Keith E. McDaniel
Executive Director,
Strategic Planning - Utilities
10499 Bradford Road
Littleton, Colorado 80127
Introduction
Today's utility and communication companies participate in a global and dynamic marketplace. Consistently faced with new markets, new competition, and increasing customer expectations, utilities must focus on increasing customer service, providing reliable service, and maintaining or lowering costs.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are proving valuable tools for achieving many of these business objectives. ERP systems knit together the various parts of a company, enabling executives to make better-informed decisions, reduce costs, and bolster productivity. The business processes automated and integrated by an ERP system include finance, accounting, human resources, work management, material management and many others. More and more companies are replacing legacy systems with pre-integrated, vendor-provided solutions. These solutions are becoming increasingly popular as corporate mergers and acquisitions result in numerous incompatible systems within a single organization.
While an ERP system can address a utility's financial business process, it does not directly support the engineering, operations, construction, dispatching, mobile computing, or maintenance processes. These business processes deal with provisioning and sustaining the service delivery network, and the applications fall into a unique environment of graphics, spatial data, and complex relationships not found in the typical ERP alphanumeric environment. In this paper the term Geospatial Resource Management (GRM) is used to designate the integrated suite of applications (depicted below) that address these business processes, which automate the provisioning and sustaining of the service delivery network. GRM applications include design change management, dispatch, service analysis, outage analysis, mobile computing, trouble reporting, operations and maintenance, enterprise viewing, access and update. These applications are highly interdependent, rely upon geospatial data, and share a common geofacilities model.
Component Overviews and Applications An overview for each component is presented below with the applications for each listed to the right of the component box.
The new construction request is initiated to expand or modify the service delivery system. These requests can be as simple as adding a new service, or extremely complex construction for new development or rerouting. Before deregulation, customers or developers within the service territory of the prevailing utility usually initiated these requests. Under the new business rules, marketing programs are now in place to pursue new development or competitor's customers aggressively. These marketing programs are highly dependent on numerous geospatial models such as facilities, demographics, environmental, and many more. Today's competitive environment is a driving force for implementing geospatial applications.
Decision support and service analysis is supported today via spatial analysis tools. Market analysis, spatial query, spatial analysis, and the generation of maps and reports are the main functionality required by these users.
Operations and maintenance require the capability to view, analyze and edit geofacilities data in the field. This capability is used to analyze existing facilities based on current conditions and past history, assist with performing field inspections and maintenance, record changes, and feed information back to the office. These applications require a field-enabled electronic mapbook that displays and redlines the facility network and geographic landbase with online access directly to the facilities database. Historic data may be pulled from ERP asset management databases and integrated into the geospatial environment where it can be analyzed based on geographic specific parameters. Facilities performance can be measured against regulator's criteria for unique geographic areas defined by polygons, corridors, or points of interest. Identifying the shortest driving path for crews to their work location is also a key function of geospatial capability.
The geofacilities model is the foundation for the Design & Change Management component of the GRM system. It includes the data model, design and placement functions, integration with engineering design and network analysis tools, map production functions, and interfaces with many ERP databases and applications. As the geospatial enabling technology, it provides long term transaction management, conflict resolution, seamless landbase and facilities model, spatial analysis functions, and geofacilities model rules validation. It supports integration with corporate computer applications, such as work management, trouble and outage management, materials management, customer information systems, real-time network management, and network analysis.
One of the most active areas of integration today is with work management system (WMS) where extensive combined benefits are realized. Compatible Unit Code (CUC) information is captured in the design stage and is the thread for integrating processes from design through job closing in the work order life cycle. The budgets for the involved departments represent a significant portion of a utility's budget. Therefore, a small improvement in productivity results in significant savings in labor costs, while providing better utilization of both company crews and outside-contractor crews.
Significant change in the demand on the facilities network must be analyzed to evaluate network design change requirements. Since all changes are recorded in the geofacilities database it is the natural interface to network analysis software. The geofacilities model maintains the status of all facilities throughout their lifecycle from design to retirement and can produce desired views for changing conditions. These conditions can be either current or projected to allow analysis of present and future demands on the system.
At most utility companies, trouble calls indicating a network outage, come from a variety of sources. The trouble reporting component collects these trouble calls. The calls come from customer call centers, the Customer Information System, the Customer Support System, the voice response unit (VRU), real time network status monitoring equipment (SCADA), automatic meter reading equipment, the Internet and direct input from the dispatchers. The key in trouble reporting is to associate the identified problem with its geographical position and physical point on the network. This is accomplished through relationships established in the geofacilities model .
An outage management system (OMS) is the major application used in the service restoration process. For many customers, this is the most significant responsibility of the utility.getting the service back online. The network model used in the OMS is maintained and created from the geofacilities model. Tight integration between the OMS and the geofacilities model is a must for efficient operations.
A trouble call can be received from the call center, the dispatcher, batch call creator, or via the IVR interface. A call can also come from SCADA, Web, or smart meters. The outage analysis engine analyzes these trouble calls and predicts the probable outage device. As trouble calls come in from the call center, the resulting outage event is automatically sent to the appropriate dispatch workstation based on the event type and location. All event data is entered into a central database, and a subset of the data is broadcast on the local area network to update the real-time status displays of the other workstations. It functions automatically, reacting to new trouble calls in the system and to dispatcher requests and overrides.
Dispatch and monitoring of routine work field crews and service restoration crews typically is seen in three independent forms in most utilities. Operations and maintenance may not use a central dispatch function at all. Construction is typically tied to work and material management and may have an independent dispatch function. Outage and emergency situations, although independent, typically require integration for reassignment of construction crews during emergency situations. Departmental lines have traditionally separated dispatch functionality, but these should be combined for greater corporate efficiency. The major functions supported include crew dispatch, call grouping, callback lists, scheduling, and crew recommendation with interfaces to support mobile computing, GPS, and Automatic Vehicle Location systems.
The map display interacts with the information-entry display so that all available information received for service calls is accessible and visible to the dispatcher. The staff can dispatch service orders effectively, monitor crews, and control the operations of all service vehicles. Because visual information is easily assimilated, the dispatchers can make their decisions in routine and emergency situations quickly, accurately, and confidently.
Mobile data components increase the efficiency of crew communications. Mobile computing systems allow crews to receive work automatically and to update the status of work on their mobile data terminals.
The access and distribution of data across the enterprise is an integral component of a geospatial resource management system. Decision support tools require the timely and easy use of the geospatial data. In order to meet the diverse enterprise access, view, and update requirements of the utility, web-based technology is becoming a critical tool to extract and interact with live geofacilities data. However, this is one of many sources for making changes to the geofacilities model and its downstream integration with other enterprise systems. While the geofacilities model has maintained the status of facilities using long-term transactions throughout the lifecycle, it is the completed and activated state that drives many of the transactions to other enterprisewide databases and applications.
Summary
GRM describes a new breed of solutions made available by the latest technology. Utility enterprise-wide information systems are composed of data-centric and geospatial-centric applications. ERP is a method used to capture the essence of data-centric applications while GRM manages the geo-spatial applications.
GRM solutions provide an integrated suite of applications that allow the automated provisioning and sustaining of the service-delivery network. These applications combine the geofacilities model data from engineering, distribution network management, and operations and maintenance, with ERP data from accounting, human resources, procurement, and project management systems. The result of sharing this combined data enterprise-wide is a GRM solution that establishes new industry standards for open facilities model management with integrated graphics. The industry is realizing bottom-line results, including significant gains in productivity.