Pepco, an Exelon Company utility based in Washington D.C., collaborated with UDC on a pilot project to design and build a unique ArcGIS Enterprise grade application that is helping to change the way utilities approach reliability analysis and condition-based maintenance. Feeder Sentinel™ is a leveraged software application, built on top of ArcGIS, that supports integrations to the utility’s operating systems allowing reliability engineers to interactively analyze data from across their organization to make informed business decisions.
Pepco’s service territory comprises the District of Columbia and Maryland’s Montgomery and Prince George’s counties. With over 1500 employees, the electric utility serves approximately 883,000 customers and maintains:
- 12,858 Transmission and Distribution lines
- 640 square miles of service area
- 134 Substations
The company’s current reliability analysis solution includes an inhouse linear and geospatial feeder analysis tool that looks at interruptions by location. The tool utilizes base data to create heat maps for external presentation showing historic reliability. The focus of analysis is primarily on underground and vegetation related outages.
Project Objectives
Exelon is an industry leader in using data analytics to drive business decisions. Pepco’s primary objectives for teaming with UDC on the reliability engineering environment were to explore how to better support system reliability and increase focus on customer reliability through even deeper, data driven analysis.
Detailed solution objectives and functionality for Pepco included:
- Provide a visual representation of reliability data to enable decision making based on a holistic view
- Ability to track reliability of feeders and each part of the feeder service area
- Monitor Grid impact of solar/renewables
- Track and minimize frequency of outage to a given customer
Project Scope
Together, Pepco and UDC worked to develop a reliability analysis solution that would enable engineers to overlay all digital and human collected information on top of feeders, provide the ability to drill down into source system details and allow engineers to analyze source system details with Esri’s Insights for ArcGIS.
The pilot reliability analysis dashboard solution includes the following integrations and data sources provided by Pepco:
- 5 Sets of Data: GIS / OMS / AMI / DERMS / SCADA
- 1 Substation
- 15 Feeders
- Run on ArcGIS Server or Portal for access
- Include Insights for ArcGIS
- SCADA Historian Integration
Feeder Sentinel™ Reliability Analysis Dashboard
The resulting reliability engineering dashboard environment, dubbed Feeder Sentinel, brings together the data from the above named systems to provide a single, integrated, interactive view at the feeder level.
Engineers can see current reliability data or review any point or period of time. Clicking on any widget or information pane within the dashboard, or on the map display, updates all other widgets and the map to show the selected feature or related data. Integrated with AMI, Feeder Sentinel shows power quality events along the feeder.
Using the integration with Insights for ArcGIS, Pepco can dive deeper and perform ad hoc spatial analysis. Insights enables users to generate thematic displays including mapping, business intelligent charts and graphs. Pepco can easily perform analysis with any of the Systems of Records’ attribution right away through the integration.
Project Benefits
Pepco’s pilot reliability engineering environment enables them to explore past, present, and future operations. Engineers can review real-time data, instead of waiting hours, days or weeks for insight. By visualizing AMI data within the dashboard, operators can easily correlate poor quality events to operations activity. Pepco can readily share data from other tools such as Esri Insights for ArcGIS and perform ad hoc analysis at any time.
In addition to contributing to an increase in reliability at a customer level, having access to all of their analytic information in one place will assist Pepco to allocate capital and O&M spending for the best return on equity.
See our joint GeoConX presentation and Esri UC presentation with Pepco Holdings for further information on the project.