Integration of asset management and GIS
Gene Kindrachuk
Convergent Group
6399 South Fiddler's Green Circle, Suite 600
Greenwood Village, CO 80111
(303) 741-8400
What is asset management?
It is important to define and understand what asset management is in the context of the
modern utility. A utility must have a total inventory of its assets both from a financial and
an operational perspective. Tracking assets from a financial perspective is necessary to
know what the original and depreciated values of assets are. For current assets, this is
required for capital budgeting purposes. For existing assets, it is necessary for
depreciation and retirement purposes. There are often additional assets that are tracked
for maintenance and reliability purposes that are not individually tracked for financial
purposes, generally because costs are low and quantities are large (i.e., switches and
fuses). Their costs are loaded in as overhead on other assets that are tracked. From a
utility distribution (and transmission) operational perspective, assets are not only those
that represent a particular financial interest, but also those against which any type of
work may be performed, or those for which historical operation, inspection, and
maintenance information needs to be maintained.
Asset management is, therefore, the maintenance of detailed information about various
types of equipment that support distribution operations, and the processes associated
with analyzing this information to plan work to be performed on these assets to maintain
them at an operational level in a cost-effective fashion.
Asset Management Systems are generally implemented as an integral part of a work
management system in the operational business unit of a utility. Many of the
commercially available work management systems provide capabilities to record
inspection and operational histories, and to establish specific criteria, which when met
or exceeded can automatically trigger the creation of work orders against that
equipment. These criteria are typically:
- based - fixed period of time since last work performed
- based - quantified levels of equipment condition-recorded from physical inspection or remote monitoring
- Operations based - a preset number of operations of a particular type, again determined from physical inspection or remote monitoring
Depending on the type of information available from the inspection or from the last work
performed, the system may be able to identify the type of work to be performed. Once
identified, the work can then scheduled and managed by the work management system
until it is complete, and the results of the work are recorded as historical information
against the asset, which in turn may trigger additional work in the future.
What is GIS?
Modern Geographic Information Systems used in utilities today are much more
advanced than the computerized mapping systems of the past. They maintain a realistic
model of a utility's distribution network on a geographic base. There are a few key
concepts here that are critical to understanding how GIS and asset management can
work together.
Today's GISs provide the capability to build connected models of a utility's distribution
facilities. A facilities model is a computerized representation of the functional
organization of the network. It describes individual facilities in terms of the function they
perform, their engineering characteristics, and their relationship to other facilities. This
facilities model is typically the nucleus of a large and diverse set of applications the
utility can use to support its operations.
The most obvious of these applications is the retrieval and presentation of graphic
representations of the model, either as graphic displays or as physical hardcopy plots.
As the electronic dissemination of graphic data becomes more prevalent, the need to
hardcopy plots is diminishing. Two key applications supported by a network facilities
model are network analysis (load flow modeling) and outage management systems.
These both rely on a connected network model that contains sufficient engineering
attribution on the facilities to define the characteristics of the facility objects. In most
cases, these applications are themselves separate systems or products that operate
within their own environments and rely on the GIS to provide a "snapshot" of the electric
or gas (or water) network at one point in time. Other applications can be developed
directly on the GIS application to support network as well as spatial analyses. These
include areas such as leak survey management, tree trimming, transformer load
management, route calculation, and optimization. The common data requirements that
the majority of these applications share is knowing what specific function is being
performed at a point in the network and what the generic characteristics of this function
point are, or what the engineering characteristics of the conductor are that connect to
functional points on the network. What is generally not required is specific knowledge of
the physical device that is performing that function such as manufacturer, age, serial
number, warranty information, and so forth.
The GIS also has the inherent capability to place facility objects in a geographic space
and identify, either precisely or aesthetically, their location. This implies that the GIS can
then ascertain various spatial relationships between facility objects, as well as between
facilities and other spatial constructs such as lines (roads), and polygons (administrative
areas).
GIS systems that are used today to address utility operations have a sophisticated
capability known as "long transaction management." While different vendors address
this in different ways, the capability essentially allows a complex change (as a collection
of a large number of individual changes) to the database to be defined over a long
period of time, and then applied as a single transaction. Again, there are implementation
differences among GIS vendors, but some version management capability related to the
long transaction mechanism is provided. These capabilities provide critical support for
the engineering design process, for as-built posting, and for engineering "what if" types
of analyses.
It is important to note that traditional databases, relational, object-oriented, and others
are short transaction databases. GIS network models reside in a long transaction,
version-managed database. There is a challenge in integrating information managed
within these two disparate database technologies.
