It seems that large-scale natural disasters such as hurricanes, massive wildfires, and tornadoes are lining up for a chance to pounce on us. Their succession of occurrence reminds us we need to be ready for the worst. For public utilities, that means being ready to implement efficient and effective outage response and service restoration – and often that means starting even before the storm is over.
Many utilities have traded in their old paper maps, for enterprise geographic information systems, or GIS, that have the ability to reflect even the most recent engineering and construction updates. The GIS is centralized, allowing for immediate and secure access by everyone who needs utility network information – be it in the CEO’s office or in the field truck. For utilities managing multiple services, a single enterprise GIS eliminates the need for individual asset management systems for electric, telecom, gas, and water networks.
Coupled with state-of-the-art weather data providing timely alerts, such as color-coded threat levels to the service territory, the enterprise GIS allows utility-wide identification of what critical assets and customers are in danger. The utility can implement shutoffs in an isolated manner to minimize the number of affected customers. It can begin planning to ensure adequate crews and equipment are mobilized – including contractor crews from other utilities offering assistance – and that materials are available to repair damage. It can plan rapid service restoration or rerouting of services around damaged assets and precisely control and track service status.
In the event of emergency, perhaps the most powerful return on the investment in an enterprise GIS is that the utility can share its accurate infrastructure data with first responders, fire authorities, emergency management groups, and public officials who assist in planning and response. Instead of waiting for the storm to pass, the enterprise GIS can make every minute count by helping decision makers triage the deployment of resources.
Conversation
Yong Huang
10 years ago
It’s true that more and more customers have GIS requirements, some require Scada with build in GIS. It’s not easy with our traditional Scada such as citect. ……
I’m wandering what features the GIS solution in the article have, and how it handle the co-operation between GIS and Scada.
Danny Petrecca
10 years ago
Yong, the nature of GIS at utilities has evolved greatly over the past decade. Fast forward to today and you see much more emphasis on integrating GIS with other real-time and operational systems. Most modern GIS environments have the ability to do this today. In fact, Schneider Electric’s ArcFM Solution has integrated with countless SCADA, OMS, DMS and ADMS systems throughout the world. More value comes in integrating other real-time information with the GIS to solve new problems that were not possible in the past. This includes weather data, as the article outlines. And, even more value is realized when GIS, real-time and weather information can be readily shared amongst key stakeholders to help in operational awareness and decision support.