The Imperial Irrigation District (IID) in California had upgraded their ArcFM environment from version 10.1 to 10.2.1b excluding the platform’s Fiber Manager extension from the upgrade due to concerns over circuit information data loss. This major system upgrade required the utility to follow precise steps in proper succession or risk failure of the upgrade and loss of circuits. The goals for IID were to accomplish the extension upgrade before the end of 2017 and maintain as many valid circuits as possible. The secondary goal for the Fiber Manager upgrade was to further enable IID to accurately model specific assets and connections within their system.
This critical upgrade dilemma left the Fiber Manager extension unusable to IID in the production environment and required the utility to maintain two different environments. IID called on UDC to perform the complex upgrade due to our vast experience with the product and resource availability to complete the project meeting IID’s end-of-year deadline.
Fiber Manager Upgrade Approach
Key responsibilities for the UDC team in accomplishing the ArcFM Fiber Manager upgrade project for IID included:
- Upgrade Fiber Manager from 10.1 to 10.2.1b in IID’s Development, Test, and Production environments
- Upgrade of the Circuit Manager productivity tool
- Trace all circuits to identify any circuit with bad or missing data
- Modify the Fiber Manager dataset schema to account for microwave, antenna, and dish data
UDC performed IID’s Fiber Manager system upgrade in three separate environments prior to the production upgrade to ensure the implementation would go as smooth as possible. The Circuit Manager productivity tool component of Fiber Manager was upgraded by adding proper header information and following specific process requirements to avoid loss of circuit data. The Circuit Manager tool makes it possible to name a circuit and manage it as a single entity within your network. Upgrading ArcFM Fiber Manager from version 10.1 to 10.2.1b to match the production environment version allowed fiber assets to be managed in the utility’s production system once again.
Modeling Microwave Assets in Fiber Manager
Following the successful completion of the upgrade within the production environment, UDC began to address the secondary requirement of the project which was to add the ability for IID to model microwave, antenna, and dish asset and connection information. Rather than change the established data model to accomplish this task, UDC used existing feature classes and added coded value domains. By addressing microwave requirements using existing feature classes, the dataset is less cluttered and un-customized. This solution enabled IID to model the wireless assets without changing the geometric network or data model thus reducing the risk of the addition.
Check out Esri & ArcFM Upgrades for Software Advancement to learn about IID’s Esri and ArcFM upgrade initiatives.