Outage Management Improvement
Project Objective
Improving Management of Electric Distribution System at a West Coast Investor Owned Utility (IOU) through Systems Integration Upgrades
Project Scope
The systems integration upgrades improved integration of a number of operations support and enterprise systems to improve outage management. The scope of integration included four middleware products including SeeBeyond, Talarian, Mercator, and IBM MQ. There were also many instances of Oracle and SQL Server used either independently or as a component of many of the systems that were integrated. Many of the systems were also deployed using multiple instances of a given product, with often one instance for each of the 17 control centers.
Northern California experienced severe storms in December 2002 that caused a large number of outages in the IOU’s distribution network, leaving many customers without electricity for several hours. These outage events confirmed the need for improving the IOU’s outage management business process. In response to this need, the IOU undertook an Electric Operations Technology Improvement Project (EOTI).
The goal of the EOTI project was to improve distribution operations at the IOU, particularly during storm conditions. A critical consideration was to implement certain high priority improvements by November of 2003, prior to the next storm season.
Specifically, the EOTI project objectives were to:
- Improve business processes through technology
- Improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the Distribution Operator (DO)
- Improve timeliness and accuracy of outage information provided to customers
- Reduce outage restoration time
- Capture data required to measure and improve performance on an ongoing basis
UISOL, along with a business partner, managed the implementation of this initiative. The project developed a multi-year roadmap for implementing the upgrades as the first step. The project team then began developing software for integrating the IOU’s existing outage information system with its field automation system. Now that this integration is complete, power outage orders can be sent to field personnel automatically using a wireless communications network and work status or damage information can be sent back to the distribution operator over the same wireless network. By enabling the IOU to better manage the troubleshooting and restoration process, particularly during severe storm conditions, customers can find out when repair crews will be able to troubleshoot and repair an outage and turn their power back on.
The IOU also integrated the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems used to manage the distribution network with the outage information system. This integration will allow data received by the SCADA systems to be automatically communicated to the outage information system at the operator’s direction, thereby increasing the accuracy and timeliness of the information and streamlining power restoration efforts.
The project also included developing a new distribution operator dashboard and integrated logging information system using state-of-the-art portal technology. This web-based intranet system will bring together many aspects of the workflow in a way that will enable distribution operators to more efficiently and effectively perform their duties. The project also tied together a number of existing independent systems using cutting-edge enterprise architecture integration (EAI) software.
The project went in production in November of 2003. Since then, UISOL has helped the IOU with a number of other integration efforts including designing the integration between Asset Management System, Work Management System, and Mobile Dispatch.
Services Provided by UISOL
- Business process modeling and analysis
- Development of technology improvement roadmap
- Requirements specifications
- Systems integration architecture & design
- Test strategy, test planning, and test management
- Management of the Program Office (i.e., PMO)
List of Systems
- ABB CADOPS
- MDSI Advantex
- Distribution Operation Logging Information Program (DOLIP)
- DC Systems SCADA
- SPL CorDaptix Customer Information System
- Siebel CCMS2
- A variety of supporting systems, such as systems for managing distribution diagrams, web-based outage management tools, asset database, interactive voice response (IVR) and call handling