Ivory tower gets wheels

Ivory tower gets wheels

Charles Marlin
Independent Consultant
993 Mint Springs Road
New Market, Alabama 37651

Claudia Bender
Information Systems Specialist
Public Service Company of New Mexico
4201 Edith Blvd NE
Albuquerque, NM 87107

Drew Mathias
Senior Applications Analyst
MidAmerican Energy Company
106 E 2nd Street
Davenport, IA 52801

Abstract
Two case studies of mobile applications, at Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM) and at MidAmerican Energy Company, show how mobile technology demolishes the wall separating AM/FM from employees working outside the office.

PNM field crews in remote areas routinely have a need to locate themselves, not on the globe, but on a map with all the company’s facilities. They do so using a ruggedized laptop with maps and software that takes a lat-long value from a GPS, converts it to (x,y) map coordinates, and shows the facility map at a usable scale with the GPS point and a truck icon centered in the screen. Hear about this and other mobile applications at PNM.

MidAmerican Energy has implemented several applications that run on mobile data terminals and laptops in the field. Employees who do locates, leak surveys, and cathodic surveys can work more efficiently because these applications present the data they need for their specific tasks. Emergency work is also made more efficient by mobile tools like circuit traces from substation to meters that assist line patrols, electrical traces to find the nearest control device, and valve isolation traces for gas.

Introduction
“Ivory Tower Gets Wheels.” Why did we choose this title? For one, it provoked an unusual, slightly absurd, and therefore memorable image. Towers don’t normally have wheels. Secondly, it captured a sense of the revolution that has taken place in the use of geospatial technology by utility companies in the last few years. With its inception in the 1960’s digital map data was the preserve of a small number of people who worked outside the mainstream of information technology. They were figuratively working in an ivory tower, trying to turn lead into gold. And unlike their medieval predecessors, they succeeded. Using arcane hardware and software, that only they understood, they attempted to produce paper maps that resembled the maps produced by hand on drawing boards just as they had been since electricity was first commercially distributed. We say “attempted” because the early versions of these maps were not well accepted by utility workers. But printing technology improved, as well as the underlying software, and the 1980’s saw literally millions of paper maps produced from automated mapping systems.

The ivory tower was productive. But the information systems were still the exclusive preserve of a priesthood of technicians who understood the special incantations required to make them work. And the goal was generally to produce paper maps.

What changed in the 1990’s, and we see the fruits of it today, was the arrival of technology that let the digital information itself, not the paper results, be placed directly in the hands of end users – the people who inspect poles, locate buried pipe or cable, or respond to emergencies. It is now cost-effective to place devices in cars and trucks that hold the entire digital model of a distribution network. Just as important as these devices is software that lets the end users interact with the data conveniently and naturally – in a way that makes sense to them and the job they are doing. The person responding to an emergency has more flexibility in viewing the network than any single map could provide. And he can analyze the network in ways no paper map could support. All using the point and click interface that anyone who has played a computer game will find familiar. No more incantations known only to the tower dwellers. The data that was so many years in the making is now available to everyone who needs it. The ivory tower has grown wheels.

Case Study – Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM)
Before describing the use of mobile computing at PNM, we should provide some context. Public Service Company of New Mexico is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with approximately 360,000 electric customers and 400,000 gas customers in a service territory of about 70 square miles along the Rio Grande Corridor meandering about the Rio Grande River. There are 5300 miles of gas main footage in PNM’s model, 7440 miles of primary wire, along with 76,441 transformers, and 315,000 addresses. PNM captures both gas and electric distribution facilities in their viewing environment; and is used by approximately 200 employees, both in the field and on the desktops.

PNM had three primary goals for mobile computing:

Decrease the time it takes a crew to find a service location.
Make the most accurate data available to crews.
Provide a means to capture more intelligent maintenance data that might in turn help target inspection dollars in the right direction.

In the process of achieving the primary goals, PNM gained a number of benefits that had not been anticipated:

Decrease dependency on a paper ‘trouble book’, an unwieldy book that requires a flashlight if used in the dead of night and is difficult to navigate when a feeder outage spans several pages. The trouble book updates are not as current as the data on the mobile viewer, and current data is an important requirement. Finally, it is very expensive to print; it accounts for approximately $50,000 per year in printing costs for 5 divisional books totaling 1300 pages. Though the books will remain as backups in emergency crew trucks, they are less necessary for the folks that have the same viewing environment on their desktops.
Reduce downtime caused by address resolution. Trouble crews, line spotters and some meter readers no longer need to pull paper maps for service addresses or gas routing information, nor do they need to call mapping and dispatch personnel during their shift for this data.
Continually purify the data. Field crews provide corrections to the data at the time of inspection, a crucial task that would be expensive to do after the fact.

Users of mobile products at PNM include 25 emergency or maintenance line crews, 12 electric and gas line spotters and 8 electric and gas designer/service managers. The emergency line crews are expected to respond to outages around the clock, so having facility information immediately accessible means shortened customer outage minutes. These crews also need to measure fault distances, and can do this readily with a ‘measure’ command in the viewer environment. To measure these fault distances from the paper trouble book, that may span several pages, would be difficult, would take longer, and would be prone to error. So the viewing tool saves time in restoring service, and just as importantly, provides accurate outage information to take back to the office and use in reporting. Maintenance line crews provide scheduled maintenance on electric and gas facilities, and for the same reasons as the trouble crews can complete a job faster and with more accurate information now that they have mapping data at their fingertips. The earliest mobile viewing users were the electric and gas line spotters, who began marking cable locations for construction crews in 1996 and continue today. The last large field group to make use of the facility data are the crew foreman and designers. Formerly, the designer would often have to make multiple trips out into the field, reconciling the design on paper with what was shown in the field. Now they have the mapping data with them for the initial site visit, and a tool that allows them to take field notes, letting them finish the design completely in the office without a second trip to the field.

Two applications have been especially effective at PNM and a third is planned:

GPS Truck Locator – This application is written in VB Script and blends programming expertise with some GPS know-how. For those laptops without an internal GPS unit, we affix an external unit that sits on the dashboard of the truck and power it off the battery charger. The application is launched from inside the viewer software. The software would normally require an input of an address or intersection to find a service location, but the GPS function lets the user select an icon on the toolbar and the application locates the truck position without any additional input. One button click locates the crew’s position! To enable such ease of locating, the lat-long coordinates are continually being received from the GPS unit and captured in a text file at regular three-second intervals. When the Truck Locator icon is selected, the last coordinate is converted to an X,Y coordinate, the format used by the mobile viewer, and then passed to a function to ‘view center’, which centers the position of the truck on the screen at a prescribed zoom level, accurate within a few feet, which is enough to locate the truck’s position relative to the correct pole. It is much faster than querying for an address, and many minutes faster than relying on their geographic knowledge of the service territory when there is no address in the model. Drivers would have to find the appropriate section map, find the interstate, spot a drainage ditch, and navigate to the location. For crews that are in rural areas where correct addressing is less than perfect, this becomes a critical function. In addition, pole numbers in our model are generated internally from the software, assigning vastly different numbers to poles than the legacy system used in the field for so many years. This makes the poles un-navigable by a standard pole number query and makes this GPS application a critical time-saver.
Automated Line Patrol System – We are required to capture maintenance data on all distribution poles in our service area. The mobile viewing environment is used as the front-end to the maintenance application, just to provide the pole number as input to the pole maintenance database. The GPS application described above is used in tandem with this application. The crewperson locates his or her position in the view screen using the locator icon, then selects the pole on which inventory will be taken. This number is validated against the same occurrence of the pole number in the database. The application then launches a series of maintenance screens, and the role of the map viewer ends; but the requirement for the crews to initially validate their position and pole location was provided with the map viewing application. Some of the maintenance data will be uploaded back into the source AM/FM data, but the main objective for the inspection application was to provide an effective mechanism for tracking pole data that would allow analysis based on feeder circuits, rather than geographic areas or boundaries that had no relation to feeders or any intelligent grouping of facilities.
Future Application – An interface is planned to a ‘Gas Statistics’ application that will replace all gas main and service cards with on-line data capture of all gas facility data (leak survey, cathodic protection, mains and services, etc.). Associated field notes will be drawn on the map and archived as an image file.

The hardware and software to support mobile computing can make the difference between acceptance and failure. At PNM, field workers use laptops with rugged hard disks, hi-brightness screens for optimal outdoor viewing, and touch sensitive screen displays. They have different mounting bracket configurations based on the hardware platform. Some have brackets with all the cable mounts in place so that the crew just slips the unit into the cradle, while others have more primitive mounting brackets.

Figure 1 – Laptop mounted in vehicle
Becoming Mobile / Acceptance at PNM
Acceptance from all of the users has been phenomenal – in most cases, folks were unhappy to have to wait for their hardware. The line spotters were ready to buy in with barely a glance at the product, and formal training couldn’t be provided fast enough to make it worthwhile. After some quick demonstrations of the queries, and some training amongst themselves, they were using most of the tools it provided. A year later they were asking how to submit field notes of data corrections within the mobile viewing environment to hand off to mapping personnel, a task that few field crews had been willing to do because it delayed the completion of their own work. The care of the hardware was the most prominent issue. The earliest laptops were partially ruggedized but had no mounting brackets, so they were prone to damage. Plus the screens did not hold up to the rugged field environment. At the threat of not having any spare hardware when one unit was off to the vendor for repair, the field personnel quickly learned to assume ownership for the units and take better care of them. The data updates were initially handled by IS support, with the intention of easing users into the role of setting off their own data update routines at their own convenience. In fact the line spotters were eager to run the update scripts more often than IS could easily support them, and they took the task on themselves.

For the trouble and field crews the acceptance was just as remarkable, usually due to the testimonials of other users. Formal training was offered, and foremen had their crews master the viewing environment on desktop PC’s before tackling the nuances of laptops, not only with a GPS attachment, but also with a much smaller keyboard, or none at all. A three-hour formal class at the desktop, followed by an hour of GPS and mobile unit training seemed the right combination of training.

Lastly, choices in hardware helped acceptance by being both reliable and easy to use. Most units had touch screens that made the dainty fingering of a keyboard totally unnecessary for the large hands of most crewmen. We matched the ruggedness of the hardware to the jostling the units would get in the different field applications. These hardware and software choices have been hugely successful in gaining the acceptance and the continued favor of the tools by field crews, who are not necessarily technophiles but are primarily interested in how useful these tools are toward improving the effectiveness of their work.

Case Study - Mobile Computing at MidAmerican Energy Company (MEC)
Before describing the use of mobile computing at MEC, we need to provide some context. MEC is a utility based in the Midwestern United States with approximately 1.3 million gas and/or electric customers in a service territory of approximately 10,000 square miles. MEC captures both gas and electric distribution facilities in their viewing environment; and it is used by approximately 400 employees, both in the field and on the desktops.

Figure 2 – MEC service area
When the AM/FM project started at MEC, one of the goals was to provide facility information to crews in the field. There were three motivations:

First, crew safety. The field crews had been relying on the radio for any information they could not see or that was not on a map in the vehicle. Their safety would be enhanced by having direct and immediate access to complete information about the distribution network.
Secondly, to enable decisions to be made in the field. If they had tools to look at the data, field crews could decide which facilities to work on first.
Thirdly, data clean up. Since migrated data will differ from the source data and the source data itself was not 100% correct, MEC knew that their data had errors. The best people to provide correct information were the employees that worked with it every day.

Users of mobile products at MEC include locators, servicemen, crew supervisors and some crews. Locators can be either company or contract employees. Their primary job is to locate our underground facilities on request. Servicemen are primarily responsible for installing services and performing “minor” repair work. Crew supervisors have responsibility for their crews. The use by crews is fairly limited. It depends on what type of device was available for their use along with the size of the truck and the size of the crew.

Four applications at MEC have been especially effective:

Meter Locates – Used primarily by locators and servicemen. It locates an address either by the customer name or meter number. It supports both gas and electric meters. It decreases response time to locate trouble and service requests.
Valve Isolation – Used primarily by crew supervisors and crews. This application identifies the valves that need to be operated in order to isolate a section of main. It provides a list of all of the valves that require operation and a list of the addresses that would be impacted. These are all highlighted and centered in the view. This application decreases response time to gas leaks and assists in decision making in the field.
Disconnect Trace – Another tool used primarily by crew supervisors and crews. This application identifies the first operable control device (fuse or switch) upstream from the problem area so that power can be shut off and work completed. It is widely used to speed up storm restoration and trouble shooting outages. As with the valve isolation trace, a list of the addresses impacted by operating the control device is provided and all features impacted by the operation are highlighted.
Circuit Trace – This is a tool used primarily by crews during major storm restorations. It is especially helpful in allowing crews that are not from the local area to work safely and effectively on an unfamiliar network. It traces a circuit from beginning to end so that the crew can then drive the circuit to discover any problems.

These four applications have expanded the use of geospatial information technology at MEC by a factor of 20:1. For each person who works in the office to maintain the digital model of the distribution network, twenty field employees or contractors use mobile applications to work more safely and more efficiently.

For hardware, all company locators and servicemen use Norand 6640C machines that mount in a rack in their vehicles. A few of the crews are equipped in a like manner, but they also use HP laptops that are not ruggedized. Two things that we found out about display was that a dark background would wash out when the device was used in the field. As a result, we switched to a white background and discovered that on all but the brightest days, the product was usable. On the days when even white backgrounds would wash out, the use of sunglasses were all that were required to correct the problem.

Becoming Mobile / Acceptance at MEC
The reactions toward adopting new mobile computing technology varied according to the culture of the two companies from which MEC was formed. In one, the employees had mixed emotions. A number of them, especially the company locators, accepted the product pretty easily. They recognized that it helped them in their job because now, in the digital world, a number of things were at their fingertips. In the old world of microfiche and paper maps, they had to dig through the media, and the data they found could be as much as six months old.

In the other company, the field employees were a little more hesitant. Where there was resistance, we won their hearts and minds using one of two approaches. First, we would work on converting one of the respected employees in the service center to the product. From there on it was easy. If we could not get one of their own converted, we used the second approach. We would concentrate on one of the supervisors (preferably one that they respected) and convert them. Although acceptance is not 100%, the areas of resistance are pretty isolated. Our success in acceptance can also be attributed to support.

As an IT staff we made some promises regarding timeliness and effectiveness of support, and thankfully we were able to keep them. Now we are at the point that it is almost impossible to swap out hardware for about 90 to 95% of our mobile users unless you bring the machine with you and the mobile application is already working. In other words, they want their mobile applications and will not give them up.

Conclusion
Applications that existed only as hopes and dreams in universities and IT departments have become the tools that utility field employees not only prefer to use, but refuse to give up. The use of geospatial technology has increased by an order of magnitude over the AM/FM/GIS elite who initially championed it. Their pioneering work over the last few decades has spread from the artificial environment of computing centers, through more normal office environments, to jostling trucks on dusty roads and emergency crew trucks beside downed power lines. The ivory tower got wheels.