Wednesday Breakout Sessions

There is a shortage of electric transmission lines. Demand is expected to grow, especially, with projects needed to harness renewable energy resources. Even so, transmission lines are unwanted by the public due to impacts to people and natural resources. Siting is a growing source of public controversy and regulatory scrutiny throughout the world.

The EPRI-GTC Siting Methodology addresses concerns by allowing groups to participate in the process and making decisions by professionals more transparent and credible. It uses ArcGIS to map all geographic features, assign stakeholder-generated suitability values, generate corridor alternatives using computer algorithms and create reports summarizing criteria used and values assigned. The Methodology has proven to be objective, consistent and defensible. This methodology was developed through a $500,000 collaborative effort co-funded by the Electric Power Research Institute, Georgia Transmission Corporation and Photo Science, their geospatial solutions partner. This presentation will give an overview of this siting methodology.

One Call ticket management systems are built to process tickets, automate Positive Response and now also provide instant access to a utility's ESRI facility maps, all through one centrally located system. One Call ticket management systems can incorporate ESRI facility maps to display the dig location of each individual locate ticket sent to a utility. When opening a ticket in map view, the map pinpoints the locate and highlights all facilities that need to be marked.

Utilities use their ESRI facility maps both in the office to screen One Call tickets and in the field to route and locate more efficiently.

The combination of electronic ticket management and GIS provides utilities one comprehensive source to efficiently process One Call tickets and safely protect their underground assets.

A GIS system can be the ideal GUI/dashboard for the Smart Grid. It can form the basis for real time grid monitoring and analysis and for active grid management. However, an electric grid is a dynamic machine whose characteristics and performance are not entirely or even primarily defined by geospatial location and attributes. Fully incorporating the connectivity and continuously varying characteristics and performance of an electric grid poses significant challenges for GIS. If properly done, an electric utility will have an accurate, intuitive and powerful analytical and control tool that can facilitate Smart Grid deployment and management.

A common theme among utilities is the need to control the data that is created or updated within their GIS. In this session, we will review a tool that gives your QA/QC team total control and tracking capabilities of the edits that are made within each session/version in a geodatabase. It accomplishes this by analyzing a version before it has been posted to create a textual and graphical report of all edits (additions, changes, and deletions) that have occurred within the version. The edits can be reviewed in a tabular report, visualized on the map, exported to a flat file, or even fed into third party QA/QC analysis tool. The functionality can be used manually by your QA team or even automated into a BRP service. Whether your needs are data integrity, user management, or audit control, this tool will never leave you guessing who did what, when, and where.

While spatial analytics may seem like yet another business intelligence buzzword, many believe that it delivers the "missing link" utilities need to meet conflicting goals for cost control, regulatory compliance, and enhanced customer service. For many years, utilities have devoted enormous resources to build and maintain systems that do an excellent job solving specific problems, but lack the ability to effectively connect the information from outage, asset, maintenance, work management and other operations support systems with spatial and business data desperately needed for insight and decision making in their most critical operations. This presentation will explore how several utilities have approached this problem and found the "missing link" using spatial analytics and business intelligence technology.

Overview of the challenge and complexity around integrating these two systems from an enterprise asset management (EAM) perspective. Introduction of 3 step project methodology to structure the integration deployment. Key integration areas useful to an EAM integration deployment:

• Synchronize SAP and GIS assets
• Associate work orders to map assets
• Monitor data across SAP and GIS systems
• View SAP data on GIS map
• Manipulate SAP data on GIS map
• Create work orders and notifications on GIS map
• Set work status from GIS
• Display distinct work orders & notifications on map Access Transporter for GIS through Web browser.
• Discussion on how to overcome the top 3 challenges when integrating these systems and how to avoid pitfalls.