A case study in implimplementing the next generation of integrated geospatial soluated solutions
The AIRe program is now at the mid-point of its planned four-year implementation.
The $26 million AIRe Program is divided into four major phases. Phases 1 and 2 of the
contract, valued at $10.6 million are mostly complete. The standalone and integrated
WMS/GIS systems, hardware, and Caguas pilot data conversion were included in the
first two phases of the project. Field Inventory and Data Conversion for the rest of the
Island (Phase 3) is currently in production. The Outage Management System (Phase 4)
is currently in the planning and design stage.
The high-level architecture diagram above depicts the integration of the GIS, WMS, and
OMS. The GIS and WMS are integrated at both the data- and user-interface levels. The
systems use shared tables in a common Oracle RDBMS and share a common Microsoft
Windows user interface. The integrated GIS/WMS is designed to support typical sevenday-
a-week, ten-hour-a-day operations. The OMS is characterized as a 24-hour-a-day,
seven-day-a-week, high-availability, high-performance system so the facilities data from
the GIS is replicated daily to a dedicated facilities database in the OMS.
The AIRe systems interface with PREPA legacy systems and several newly installed
turnkey systems to reduce interoffice mailing time, paperwork, and other "non-valueadded"
work. The project includes interfaces to ten major computer systems: customer
service, finance, human resources, materials, payroll, planning, SCADA, fleet
maintenance, and two engineering circuit analysis packages, SynerGEE and CADPAD.
In the future, AIRe will have the capability to interface with Automatic Meter Reading
(AMR) and Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) systems.
work management system (WMS)
The STORMS system has been configured with PREPA's business practices and
standards. PREPA personnel throughout the entire island of Puerto Rico have now
been trained on the system. All construction and repair projects are now being entered
and managed with the system. The WMS interfaces to other PREPA systems provide
immediate electronic access from all work locations to materials, personnel, vehicles,
and equipment for assignment and tracking of work requests. This capability was not
possible in a single system prior to implementation of the AIRe Program. Many routine
jobs that do not involve changes to the electrical network are now being handled and
closed quickly and efficiently with a minimal amount of paper generation.
The WMS system maintains the compatible unit (CU) tables that are used within the
WMS and GIS to ensure that PREPA's design standards are used for all construction
work. The CU's for a specific work request are typically assigned during the design
session in GIS and then used within the WMS to assign resources and manage
completion of construction projects on a work point basis.
Procedures have been developed for work requests that involve electrical design or
electric facility changes pertinent to both the WMS and the GIS systems. The system
not only manages the design process, but also manages all aspects of the work,
including initiation, facilities design, cost estimating, work approval by management,
assignment of resources, management and tracking of the work in the field, as-built
posting of any construction changes that are different than the original design, closing of
the work request, and assignment of costs to specific facilities for historical tracking of
work and costs.
Geographic Information System (GIS)
PREPA chose to implement the Intergraph G/Electric system as the GIS for the AIRe
Program. In fact, this system is the first customer implementation of the GFramme
technology in the world.
The system is configured to model PREPA's transmission, substation, and primary
distribution networks. The user interface to the system guides our designers to quickly
and easily make the correct choices for selecting and placing electrical features in the
model. The designer is guided to select the correct CU's for all features placed,
ensuring adherence to PREPA's electrical design standards. With virtually no time
delays in the map display, designers can create new designs or modify existing facilities
much faster than we have seen with other systems.
The GIS provides a precise model of PREPA's transmission, substation, and distribution
facilities.
