Nearing the completion of Cleco’s GIS replacement / SAP / ADMS project and during their ArcFM Designer implementation phase, Cleco expressed interest to UDC in leveraging their recent system investments to drive operational dashboards to gain actionable insight supporting outage and reliability management. Headquartered in Pineville, Louisiana, Cleco Corporation serves approximately 290,000 retail electric customers. Within reach of hurricanes and related weather events, Cleco recognized the major benefits that real-time operational analysis and visualization capabilities, enabled by digital twin technology, could provide.
UDC brought in our Digital Utility® Digital Twin solution team to conduct an exploratory workshop with our client. The team determined that we could indeed use Cleco’s Schneider Electric ADMS data and inhouse developed reliability scripts, in addition to their Esri Enterprise GIS, to build three requested dashboard views. UDC developed real-time outage, historical outage, and reliability analysis dashboards using our DyAN™ leveraged software at the base of their solution. We then connected the dashboard views with Cleco’s existing data sources to create a robust and unique representation of their data for reporting and analysis. Once deployed, Cleco received training and materials on dashboard functionality for a variety of users within the company.
Solution Elements
Specific applications and connections used within the Cleco digital twin solution included:
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Esri ArcGIS Enterprise to leverage Cleco’s data information in a collaborative space
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Esri Web AppBuilder for ArcGIS to host and provide configurable and customized web apps, used in the DyAN™ interface
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Safe Software FME to bring data in from other systems, for example Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS), Geographic Information System (GIS), Occupational Requirements Survey (ORS) database, and Kubra files
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UDC’s Digital Utility® DyAN™ to display personalized interactive and dynamic widgets, interface and organize real-time data for efficiency and practical application.
Solution Deliverables
The goal of the Cleco digital twin solution was to develop and deploy three dashboard views using their Schneider Electric ADMS data and home-grown reliability scripts to drive the DyAN dashboard built on the Esri ArcGIS Enterprise platform. Each view had its own particular requirements for the team(s) that would be using it.
Electric Outage Operations Dashboard
The Outage Operations dashboard was designed to only represent active outage data. The data truncates every 24 hours and automatically refreshes on the dashboard every 5 minutes. The Cleco Time Series chart displays 5-minute snapshots of customers out and outage counts across a 24-hour timeline. This view uses the same Kubra file as the external system on Cleco’s website, bringing data from across multiple systems into one view.
Electric Outage Historical Analysis Dashboard
The Historical Analysis dashboard displays 3 years of historical data and has extensive date range filtering capabilities. It uniquely displays the Frequency of Customer Outage range. This range can be interactively filtered to bring up an attribute table that lists the specific facilities (GIS features) which were involved in those customer outages for further analysis.
Electric Outage Reliability Dashboard
The Outage Reliability dashboard displays reliability indices data which is truncated every three years. The data is symbolized as gauges which shows SAIDI, SAIFI, and CAIDI as two data layers: company target goals against actual indices. Indices can also be interactively filtered by cause or a selected area.
Featured Cleco Dashboard Widget Functionality
Each widget, or dashboard Chart within Cleco’s digital twin solution using DyAN, interactively filters and updates the entire dashboard, including other widgets and data displayed in the map extent, based on the user’s selection.
Data is grouped by attributes (ex: Feeder number and Incident Id) and displayed by the Sum of the Measure (ex: Customers Out and Outage Count). This data can then be displayed either by bar graph, pie chart or line graph.
With a click of a button, the chart data can be translated to a list view, more suitable for full screen tabular data analysis which can be sorted and searched.
Drilldown Starburst Chart – This particular DyAN widget gives the Cleco user the ability to pre-filter the data to a specific geographical area of their company hierarchy (ex: company, division, district). The center of the Starburst displays statistics related to Customers Out and Outage Count. A color legend is included to determine numeric levels.
DyAN Time Series Chart – displays snapshots of Cleco’s customers out and outage count across a specified time frame.
DyAN Attribute Table – provides details of outage incidents. Filters from the DyAN dashboard charts also apply to the Attribute Table. Cleco has an option to export from the attribute table to a CSV file.
Digital Twin Solution Benefits
The Cleco digital twin dashboards provide an easily accessible view of the current, past, and reliability performance of their network to enhance the utility’s operational management capabilities, study outage events, and monitor reliability and performance. By using a single solution that provides three distinctive dashboard views, Cleco’s teams benefit from the continuity of a straightforward, user-friendly application. The deployment of one solution greatly reduced the overall cost for Cleco. Easily adaptable, future use cases and workflows that monitor the network can be implemented by configuring additional views or widgets to display the provided data.
To read from Cleco’s perspective on how the digital twin dashboards are helping the utility better manage outage operations and communications before, during, and after the storm, see Emergency Response and the Operational Digital Twin: Cleco’s Dashboard Solution.
Learn more about UDC’s Digital Utility dashboard solutions:
Outage Communications for Grid >