CHALLENGE

It is critical that electric utilities be able to confidently analyze their GIS data as it relates to grid connectivity and solving specific business problems. Due to various historical factors, GIS data is not always accurate, comprehensive, or fully accessible for downstream applications.  Data-input errors can affect system connectivity, thus causing sections of the grid to appear isolated in the design state. Other times, the GIS connectivity model may not fully capture load points due to an organization’s prior decisions to not fully document certain types of circuits (i.e. secondary). This situation was present the organization, where GIS were forced to manually conduct tedious and time-extensive analysis when connectivity issues were discovered.

SOLUTION

To reduce the labor required to manually trace through circuits, the organization needed a flexible, configurable trace tool that could be easily and reliably used to gather accurate information to solve complex business problems. The trace tool also needed the flexibility to trace through different types of connectivity models: electrical, static wire, and communications connectivity, as well as ductivity (duct and conduit networks connecting structures). A highly-configurable, general-purpose trace tool was developed to establish customizable traces. For each tracing need, the analyst can able to select a trace type and configure an assortment of properties of the trace to determine which GIS conditions are traceable. The trace results can then be collected and analyzed to solve a specific business problems.

RESULT

The manual efforts to gather connectivity information were greatly reduced or even eliminated for end users throughout the enterprise.  Connectivity data accuracy improved substantially and maintained consistency across data sets with the introduction of this trace tool. Most importantly, the trace tool was instrumental in generating pseudo-connectivity for the primary electrical circuits for the GIS-to-ADMS interface, which was based on the pre-existing GIS data and configured to include additional feature types as well as customized business rules and overrides. Since initial deployment, the custom trace tool has saved time and money, and has been used for numerous other efforts including but not limited to: validation checks, comparisons of the feeder circuit attribution, and collection of marginal device characteristics.