How do engineering design tools fit in with AM/FM/GIS?
Users Skills and Roles
A designer's specific role will help determine the complexity of the tools that are
needed. A designer who is deeply involved in custom design jobs may be interested in
more complex tools, while a designer who relies more on standards and common jobs
may prefer simple tools. The background, role, and focus of the designers at a utility will
play a large part in what tools are most appropriate. For KCPL, the designers will work
in the AM/FM/GIS environment, but will be doing repetitive, routine jobs and will not be
ultimately responsible for clean, postable data. They will be interested in digitizing their
jobs so that they can perform some level of analysis, generate a construction plot, and
pass their CU information to work management. This will allow them to be most
concerned with the graphic display and establish only a minimum of the relationships and
attribution.
What are the common job types?
The designers' jobs differ greatly from one district to another. Some districts in
more established areas tend to have jobs geared more toward maintaining and re-working
older or smaller capacity lines. The newer or growing areas include some of that type of
work, but they also have work that is entirely new. Designers of new work encounter a
fairly standard set of facilities, so the work will look similar and be more easily
standardized.
The highest volume of KCPL's jobs are for new customers-usually subdivisions
or commercial developments. In these cases, the loads are projected, based on typical
data. The next-largest volume of KCPL's jobs are maintenance upgrades. These jobs
require more analysis of the current data and are a great way to take advantage of the
existing AM/FM/GIS data. The lowest-volume jobs are custom and/or industrial. These
are the jobs that require complex analysis and must have real projected loads so that the
designers can create accurate designs.
What is driving the exactness of the results?
In our discussions, we found a combination of available approaches for these
tools. Traditionally, many of the calculations were reduced to a table in the book of
company standards. Some tools used fairly standard calculations, while others followed
more of a rule-of-thumb method. Then, of course, some tools used set calculations with
various constants, look-up table variables, and safety factors. These were more complex
and required more expertise in setting up and in understanding the result. We found that
all of these approaches were useful in certain situations; however, we were most
interested in minimizing design time and in using the tool as a "sanity check" for a
veteran designer or as a learning tool for a new designer.
Additional influences drove our focus. We wanted to forego the detailed analysis
used by standards to establish standard materials. The designer tools have to evaluate
only the current standard materials, not all available industry materials. Another option
we discussed was using look-up tables. However, we found that lower-cost design
requires more analysis at the specific job level and cannot be accomplished with
traditional broad-based table look-up. We also wanted the designers to have all the tools
available to them in the AM/FM/GIS design environment.
Another issue was data collection. For complex tools, this could be too timeconsuming
and costly for common high-volume designs. Also, how and where would
this data be stored? The AM/FM/GIS data models are not geared for this level of data. It
may be found in homegrown databases, but is often not available and must be collected.
In this case, more inputs or standards-based defaults are required, adding work for the
designer. Resorting to defaulting values loses some of the benefit of the more complex
computation. Even when this data is gathered, the issue of determining the best storage
location remains. If storage is not in the GIS data, certain considerations regarding the
linking of this data must be made. Facilities may need to be treated in different ways,
depending on what is tracked as assets and what lifecycle they go through in GIS or
Work Management applications.
One significant issue required that we look closely at the more rigorous approach
to the calculations. KCPL is currently conducting a pole inventory and checking the
attachments and moments of all their poles. They are finding situations in which many
foreign attachments are being placed on the poles. More and more disputes have arisen
recently about who is responsible for replacing these poles. Because of the recent
attention of the pole moment, KCPL wants to be sure they are basing their calculations on
clear industry standards.
