Abstract
This paper addresses issues that energy companies face when
expanding operations across international borders. Emphasis
will be on AM/FM/GIS implementation related issues, such as
handling different government regulations, managing
different projections systems, dealing with data and
readouts in different measuring units (metric, English
etc.), international data transfers, achieving data
security, providing access to data across a global
enterprise, multilingual user interface, and handling
regional sensitive data
Introduction
Privatization of state-owned energy companies in many
nations around the globe has had a major impact on the
global energy market. Many of the US companies are
investing in hundreds of million of dollars in these newly
privatized energy companies abroad. Globalization is
changing the energy market profoundly by providing an
alternate opportunity for maximizing return on investment.
Energy companies are looking at how this globalization can
best be managed to produce the greatest possible benefits to
the bottom dollar.
One great opportunity to enhance the return on investment
through Globalization is to move the various international
assets to a common AM/FM/GIS platform. AM/FM/GIS systems
play a key role on enterprise wide implementations. These
implementations provide graphic representation to company’s
assets and integrate several distinct alphanumeric
applications enabling communications between departments
that may very well be in different countries. Different
users can now use a single source of data, eliminating cost
related to training, data redundancy and maintenance.
Handling Different Government Regulations
Energy companies around the world have been under strict
government regulations in each of the countries that they
operate. These regulations can vary from country to country.
Some of the tasks the AM/FM/GIS system is used within an
energy company are:
-
Performing research and analysis (Class, MAOP etc…) on
the network infrastructure to make sure that it meets
or exceeds the expectations of the regulating
government bodies of the country in which they operate
(e.g. Department of Transportation or FERC for United
States; National Energy Board in Canada).
-
Reporting to the different government agencies on their
network and infrastructure (e.g. NPMS Reporting)
-
Determining areas within the infrastructure that
requires upgrades.
Global solutions for the global market require AM/FM/GIS
systems be implemented with software that can be easily reengineered
to meet all of the different rules and
regulations enforced on them
Managing Datta in Different Projection Systems
One important issue faced by the AM/FM/GIS implementation
team while expanding their systems globally is the handling
of data in different projection systems, that is, how data
is stored, displayed and reported in each area locally.
Energy companies within the United States have already gone
through this problem earlier when they started expanding
their networks within the United States. Some have chosen
to use a single projection system which can cover the entire
area of operation without introducing any major distortions
in distance, direction, scale and area (e.g. Albers Equal
Area), while others have chosen to use multiple projections
to store and display data (e.g. State Plane).
Current AM/FM/GIS applications allow the storage of the data
into one projection system and the display and manipulation
of that data into another projection. Therefore, the option
to select a common projection system and presenting the data
to the end-user on a familiar projection system seems to be
the best approach to the authors. A very important
consideration is performance – the conversion will have to
be extremely fast to be performed on the fly, which can be a
major issue when dealing with large amounts of data. Another
possible solution is for the conversion to be performed upfront,
so the end user connects to data that is already
converted to the desired map projection.
