For electric and gas utilities, ensuring customer satisfaction and excellent customer service relies on accurate information from a variety of systems across the Enterprise. In the electric utility organization, systems such as the Geographic Information System (GIS) and Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS) drive efficient decision making and action during power quality events and outages. These systems help utilities mitigate residential and business customer impacts ranging from food and drinking water safety, damaged electric equipment, illness from extreme temperatures, vehicle and power line hazards, stored computer data and revenue loss.
Your management systems are only as good as the data you’re putting in. Given that GIS frequently feeds multiple downstream business systems, a priority should be given to eliminate the potential for bad data coming out.
Content Overview
The Challenge
It’s an Industry challenge to ensure that you’re feeding all systems with current, consistent, quality data and have the ability to verify data accuracy at any point in time. To reduce the man hours and effort of manual manipulation or massaging of data, it is recommended to enforce a higher degree of quality in the GIS data as it updated and edited. By configuring and customizing your GIS with mandatory Quality Assurance and Quality Check (QA/QC) validation, the user is required to post data to the geodatabase which provides the most benefit to the utility as a whole.
Tackling the Challenge
To achieve data accuracy throughout feeding systems, you must start with the data that you have right now. A few questions you will want to address are:
- What data do we have in our GIS – is it current, is it complete?
- What data is needed to feed our downstream systems?
- What is the quality level of that data?
- How can we prevent errors from happening?
There is a series of tasks for data requirement assessment and definition activities that support data accuracy and cleanup process. At high level, these tasks can be defined as:
Working through these questions and a systematic process of assessment will allow your utility to:
- Establish and maintain a single source of quality data, or “Single Source of Truth”, through quality review and data clean-up or improvement, if necessary.
- Maintain data quality as it feeds to downstream systems by putting QA/QC controls in place.
- Validate from System to System that the data quality remains consistent.
Validation Requirements
Your utility’s data validation requirements are specific, but generally the requirements can be categorized into groups based on identified needs. For example:
Beginning with GIS Data
The validation of GIS connectivity and circuits is important because it serves as the main source for network topology and connectivity data. It contains important characteristics regarding network devices outside the substations fence.
Implementing GIS QA/QC data validation with the Schneider Electric ArcFM product tools helps maintain good data that is consistent between editors and can be end-user friendly. Assigning model names and field model names is necessary when configuring ArcFM validation. Rules are configured in ArcCatalog at the feature or object class level, and to attribute fields. In-conjunction, Autoupdaters can be another layer of validation that maintain referential integrity and should be assigned to feature classes, fields on feature classes and relationship classes. If the out-of-the-box solution does not provide robust enough results, then custom rules for QA/QC can be configured into the geodatabase.
You may need custom validation based on specific functionality in your current GIS, which can’t be replicated after migrating to an eGIS using Esri and Schneider Electric solutions. For those of you who want or need a more specialized approach to QA/QC validation, custom rules can also help.
Custom rules that UDC has implemented previously, for example, are:
- UDC Validate Operating Voltage Increase: This object validation rule ensures that a feature with an operating voltage model name field has values that either remain the same or decrease as you move from upstream to downstream adjacencies of transformers.
- UDC Validate Pri OH Phase: This object validation rule validates that a unit phase of a conductor matches the parent phase of a Primary Overhead Conductor without duplication, missing phases or extra phases. This validation rule will allow for a neutral unit record and will not produce an error when one is present.
Using batch QA/QC tools like Esri’s ArcGIS Data Reviewer and Laurel Hill’s GeoData Sentry application are good examples of additional data management practices. These applications provide powerful automated or semi-automated review of geodatabase integrity (data model, business rules, etc.) and advanced data types (topologies, utility network, etc.). They can also provide configurable test suites and quality reporting functionality.
Addressing Systems Downstream
OMS
The high-level value of OMS is customer service, which is only possible if GIS sends OMS a good electric connectivity model that includes where customers are connected. Many of the OMS and ADMS vendors have QA/QC environments that should be loaded from the GIS and run to validate the GIS connectivity data and customer count information. Additional referential integrity checks can be developed in the GIS to validate the customers exists that are assigned to a GIS distribution transformer or service point.
ADMS
The high-value of an ADMS, in addition to its OMS functionality, is its set of model driven advanced applications that optimize the configuration of the grid based on current and forecasted operating conditions. An ADMS needs more than just a good electric connectivity model. It needs foreign keys to other systems such as Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), Protection & Control (P&C), Meter Data Management System (MDMS), etc.) to provide the ADMS applications all of the power system characteristics such as nameplate ratings that these other systems are the systems of record for.
Running a planning tool interface after the GIS work order has been entered into the GIS, such as SynerGi or CymDist, and generating power-flow results without using system defaults would act as a great QA/QC process that says all business systems are ready to support the ADMS set of advanced applications.
Learn more about our ADMS services.
DER Support
One of the high-level values of a distribution planning tool is to support the growth rate of distributed energy resource (DER) connection applications. By having good interfaces between GIS, CIS, EAM and MDMS and the distribution planning tool, advanced GIS applications can be built to support the DER connection application and engineering study activities and provide customer status in a timely and predictable manner.
Validation Designed for You
Modern grid technologies are growing in complexity which has utility companies facing the challenges of customer’s increasingly high expectations for dependable power. Your downstream systems must be available, responsive, accurate and reliable always. Proper QA/QC should carry through systems so that you’re comfortable and confident making decisions. The solutions described play a vital role in supplying current, consistent, quality data, and ultimately reducing risk for your utility. We invite you to contact us to learn more about how QA/QC and Enterprise Validation can improve your GIS and ADMS systems.