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A case study in implimplementing the next generation of integrated geospatial soluated solutions
Carlos L. Cruz
AIRe Program Manager
Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority
Office 215, State Road 838 Km 151
Bo Monacillos, Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico 00925
David E. Mulder
PREPA AIRe Program Manager
Intergraph Utilities
AIRe Program Manager
Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority
Office 215, State Road 838 Km 151
Bo Monacillos, Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico 00925
David E. Mulder
PREPA AIRe Program Manager
Intergraph Utilities
Introduction
This presentation describes the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority AIRe Program, a case study in implementing the next generation of geospatial solutions. PREPA: The acronym for the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, also known by it's Spanish equivalent of Autoridad de Energia Electrica de Puerto Rico (AEE). AIRe: The name of the integrated resource management system project and is derived from the Spanish Administración Integrada de Recursos.
The AIRe Program provides powerful information tools to manage increasingly complex engineering and administration issues, enabling PREPA to provide better service to customers while streamlining work order management and dispatch functions in the field. The highly independent systems support outage management, geographic information, and work management processes - yet these systems are completely and seamlessly integrated to share geospatial information across the enterprise. Systems within the AIRe Program integrate with PREPA's financial, materials, and customer service systems, creating a complete Geospatial Resource Management (GRM) environment.
Maximum benefits of technological solutions can only be achieved when you have eliminated "all" of the paper, enter data only once at the source, and distribute information electronically to those who need it. While the AIRe system is not yet fully deployed, PREPA has already eliminated much of the paper and duplicate data entry in the engineering and construction processes. This presentation describes the AIRe system, discusses some of the business processes and the benefits PREPA expect to achieve from this strategic project.
Background>
PREPA serves approximately 1.4 million customers across the entire island of Puerto Rico, which covers 3,459 square miles with a population of 3.6 million people. Approximately 71% of the population lives within urban communities; the remainder live in rural areas. Puerto Rico's size, geography, and weather conditions present PREPA with unique challenges.
PREPA's transmission and distribution responsibilities are divided into seven regions containing twenty-seven districts. The center portion of Puerto Rico is very mountainous, with peaks up to 4,390 feet, and many small winding roads. Some towns on the island are not well organized - for example, the same street address may be used more than 20 times in one town, causing difficulty for field crews to locate facilities. A yearly hurricane season is a constant challenge in Puerto Rico. In 1996, Hurricane Hortense caused extensive damage and cost PREPA customers $22 million in electric facility repairs. In 1998, Hurricane Georges, the worst hurricane in recent history, caused $213 million in damages to PREPA with a loss of electrical services lasting from days to months throughout the island.
Deregulation and ineffective work processes forced PREPA management teams to evaluate their options. As a result, the utility reviewed and revised its business processes to address the impending changes and to work more efficiently. A facilities information mapping system could easily pinpoint its customers and assets, while an outage management system could maintain the operational status of the distribution network. After a head-to-head evaluation of the world's major GIS, WMS, and OMS vendors, PREPA realized a major reengineering effort was required. As a consequence, PREPA turned to Intergraph Utilities and their partners, Severn Trent Systems and Analytical Surveys, Inc. for a fully integrated Geospatial Resource Management (GRM) solution.
AIRe Program
The AIRe project, awarded on December 22, 1998, includes three major integrated computer systems including Intergraph's G/Electric software for the Geographic Information System (GIS) and InService for dispatch and Outage Management (OMS). The STORMS Work Management System (WMS) is provided by Severn Trent Systems. Field Inventory and Data Conversion will provide a brand new digital facilities database for all of PREPA's transmission and primary distribution facilities in Puerto Rico. The landbase, consisting of high resolution planimetric and orthoimage data on which the facilities data overlays, is a new digital landbase obtained from CRIM, a Puerto Rican government agency.
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.
Outage Management System (OMS)
The Outage Management System chosen for the AIRe Program will provide a fast, reliable, and highly available system to manage electrical network emergencies that cause customer power outages. With interfaces from PREPA's Customer Information System and SCADA, the OMS receives notices of possible outages, which are analyzed by an outage inference engine that predicts the probable cause of failure based on the location of the outage in the electrical network. Dispatchers can then quickly assign and dispatch crews to the field to repair any damage to the network.
The dispatcher has visual access to track pending events, locate outages, monitor repair crew locations, and manage all outage events. All transactions within the system are date and time stamped so statistics of outage occurrences can be accurately reported directly from the system.
If a repair crew finds additional work that needs to be scheduled for another time, the dispatcher initiates a work request through the WMS that is then managed along with all other routine maintenance work.
Hardware
High-performance clustered servers were installed to support the GIS and WMS systems. The GIS normally operates on one server and the WMS operates on an identically configured second server. Should one of the servers fail for whatever reason, the WMS and GIS applications automatically revert over to the server that is still working. The WMS and GIS systems maintain separate Oracle databases to support the applications.
Additional redundant database, communications and web servers are provided for the OMS. These systems are configured for high availability with mirrored backup servers that automatically take over if one of the servers fails for any reason. To effectively operate the GIS and WMS from PREPA's 27 district offices located throughout the island, PREPA relies on its communications network, a critical resource in distributing the GIS/WMS/OMS information to end users. PREPA has T1 communications circuits to each of its district offices supporting the AIRe systems and other corporate systems.
Field Inventory/Data Conversion
Many of the high voltage transmission towers in Puerto Rico are not easily accessible. These were captured via fixed-wing aircraft flown directly above the transmission lines. The aircraft was outfitted with onboard GPS-controlled video cameras - one was forward-looking and the other vertical. The data they generated was processed to provide a coordinate (within 1 m accuracy) for each transmission tower. A still image of each tower, from the forward-looking camera, was loaded into the GIS. A designer can recall it by clicking on the transmission tower in the map view. A digital video for each transmission line is available on CD-ROM and is used by PREPA to identify possible right-of-way encroachments along the corridors.
The field inventory and data conversion for the Caguas pilot area is complete and field crews are currently collecting electric facilities data for the remainder of the island by means of field software on pen-based computers. The OMS must know the transformer that feeds energy to each customer in order to analyze and aggregate outage calls from customers who report trouble. Since PREPA does not currently have this link in the customer information system, the linkage of customer premise locations with the transformer is being captured during the data conversion process and maintained within the GIS.
Prepa Workflow Processes
The information systems that work within the AIRe Project environment provide tools for all PREPA employees - who perform functions within the T&D organization - to operate efficiently and effectively. It is not possible in this presentation to describe in detail the many workflow processes that PREPA intends to apply to the AIRe system. However, the following list provides the major types of work that will be accomplished:
- Capital construction projects - Perhaps the major use of AIRe will be for new and maintenance construction projects related to the capital assets of the transmission, substation, and distribution networks. These projects range from small one-day projects (e.g., to replace a pole) to large capital projects that run for many months and involve many construction crews.
- Field Inspections and Service Orders - Maintenance of the electric networks is a costly effort for every utility. Routine inspections are required to replace rotten poles, trim trees that interfere with electric circuits, and wire, insulator, and other inspections needed to find potential areas that can affect customer service. The AIRe systems provide the tools to manage all these activities in an efficient manner. Field applications capture all inspection data whether it is for routine inspections or for damage assessment after a storm. All this information is maintained in the AIRe databases. Service order field applications manage the service orders that fix the many problems reported to the system.
- Streetlights - PREPA maintains the streetlights of most of Puerto Rico and charges municipalities for this service. With AIRe, PREPA will more easily be able to keep accurate counts of the streetlights within geographic boundaries and better manage projects to change luminaries.
- Pole Attachments - PREPA is modeling communications and cable TV attachments to PREPA-owned poles that must be billed to other agencies. The GIS will provide accurate information to manage these pole attachments.
- Equipment change programs - PREPA has ongoing programs for upgrading parts of the network - e.g., to change meters to automated meters, to replace transformers that contain PCB's, and to change mercury lights to sodium lamps. It has been difficult for PREPA to locate and count these facilities in order to estimate costs and make effective implementation plans. The AIRe systems will significantly aid in planning for these projects and in implementation and progress reporting once the projects have been commissioned.
- Electric circuit analysis - The GIS software performs traces of the electrical network and prepares the input data needed for PREPA's network analysis software. Additionally, the GIS significantly reduces the time taken as well as normal operator error typically made during preparation of these analysis packages. PREPA engineers can more thoroughly analyze options related to planned network changes and resolve possible trouble areas.
Pioneering the latest technology can be a high risk/return option; nevertheless PREPA's decision to implement the AIRe Program is expected to pay big dividends by significantly reducing the paper flow and overhead costs in the organization. Utility facilities have always been managed on maps, but historically these paper-based systems are difficult to prepare, keep current, and distribute. New geospatial technologies allow facilities data to be easily generated, updated, and related to other information in the corporation in order to build a foundation for decision-making across all aspects of the corporation. Getting the right information immediately to decision makers and field crews eliminates many intermediary processes, improving efficiency within the organization and, more importantly, customer service.
The success of the AIRe Program is largely based on the integration of systems being deployed as part of the project and their interaction with other information systems within PREPA. By utilizing the proper information from all these systems in an integrated environment, PREPA will realize the maximum overall benefit.