Electric Energy T&D - Index

Electric Energy T&D - EE Magazine March / April 2009 - Index

Designing and Populating Geospatial Systems to Support Advanced Applications for Field Automation
Utility Automation Level of Adoption Key Characteristics
Level One - Standalone
Deployments for Mapping,
Facilities Management and
Workforce Automation.
Level Two - Integration of Energy
Delivery Systems for Workforce
Optimization (GIS, CIS, OMS,
WMS, GWD, CMMS)
Level Three - Integration of
Energy Delivery Data Marts for
Asset Optimization
Level four - Integration of Near
Real-time Field Automation
from substation and distribution automation,
SCADA, advanced meters and other field
automation devices, enabling near real-time
analysis and decision-making.
Field Automation Data Requirements
Field automation entails the installation of
various types of monitoring and operating
devices at the electric substation and
potentially including devices within the
customer premise. These can be meters,
automated switches, monitored reclosers or
sectionalizers. They will either be autonomous
devices that perform specific actions based
on specific monitored location conditions
or, communicate with a central monitoring
and control system, such as a Distribution
Management System (DMS), to provide status
information and/or accept commands. A DMS
is a decision support system to assist the
control room and field operating personnel
with the monitoring and control of the electric
distribution system, specifically to minimize
impact of outages to customers and to protect
the system from damage due to failures.
Communication between the field automation
device and the central monitoring and control
system can be over the electric network itself
via BPL (Broadband over Power Lines), a
dedicated communications network (such
Localized application; value-added tools such as
graphic work design leverage geospatial technology,
but other non-spatial tools such as work management
do not and miss opportunities. Data redundancy and
multiple maintenance results in many conflicts.
Integrated applications leverage spatially enhanced
functionality; the value of non-spatial applications
is extended through location-based awareness.
Integration through enterprise integration technology.
Business processes are still largely departmental.
Integration occurs at the business process level;
definition of enterprise workflows. Instead of spatially
enabling applications, core data are spatially enabled
— attaching a location to each asset optimizes the
asset management process. GIS is enabling technology
and the correlation engine for analysis.
Real-time, location based data from substation and
distribution automation, SCADA, advanced meters and
other field automata are integrated, enabling near realtime
analysis and decision-making.
Table 1 - Field Personnel Functions
as fiber), cellular communications or radio
frequency (RF) media. In any case, in
order for the DMS to correctly interpret the
information being fed to it and to make the
correct decisions about actions to take, an
accurate representation of the distribution
system is required. This accuracy is not
necessarily from a spatial perspective, but
from the aspect of electrical connectivity.
Modern DMS applications perform near realtime
power flow calculations to either provide
information to operators about whether
switching operations can or cannot be safely
performed or to allow those decisions to be
made automatically. This representation (or
model) must be such that for every location
where an Intelligent Electronic Device (IED)
is installed, the system needs to know the
characteristics of the circuit downstream
of that device in terms of customers, loads,
peaks, conductors, generators, and other
devices.
The GIS model that would feed such a
system therefore needs to have a complete,
accurate, connectivity model from the
substation through to the customer at the
individual phase level. The model must
provide for the ability to represent internally
the individual phases (conductors, units
March-April 2009 Issue I
within a bank, customer connections) of
all electrically conducting features. This
includes the conductors, switches, fuses,
transformers, capacitors, reclosers, and
sectionalizers. Particularly, complex devices
such as pad mounted switchgear need to be
accurately depicted in terms of their internal
configurations. This requires modeling the
internal bus, switches, fuses, and elbows that
make up that equipment.
With these new field automation applications
in mind, a utility can proactively enhance
its GIS and related databases to provide the
required data structure and content to support
field automation. This requires planning,
design and conversion activities to bring data
organization, contents and quality on par with
field automation requirements.
Current State Assessment of Data
The first task to be undertaken is to develop
a thorough understanding of the current GIS
database as well as other related datasets
that provide additional information about
the electric system. These would include
the utility’s customer information system
(CIS), possibly a work management system
that contains asset or equipment data, and
standalone equipment configuration and
maintenance databases.
It is very common in GIS (as well as many
other databases and systems) that the initial
data model design includes attributes and
relationships based on the many user and
application requirements. But for various
reasons during initial database population
(conversion) or through ongoing updates
through related business processes, this
information was either not populated, or
was populated inconsistently. In addition,
as business requirements change, there is
often a need to start capturing additional
information about database entities. In many
cases it may not be possible, practical, or cost
effective to modify the database schemas and/
or applications software to record this new
information. In these instances, the fall back
tactic is to place this information into the
comments or another unused field in a coded
fashion. In many cases this is information that
needs to be structured correctly in a database
so that it can be made available to various
applications and end users.
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