Mark Volz of Ergon Energy gave a presentation at AU that described how Ergon Energy has integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP), GIS, and design systems around a single point of truth and provides web-based access. Ergon's business objectives are to increase productivity to address the challenge of an aging workforce, decrease the time required to restore outages to improve quality of services, and to prepare for the implementation of a smart grid.
Ergon Energy is a large electrical utility supplying electricity to rural Queensland, Australia. Ergon Energy maintains a network that includes 17,000 km of sub-transmission network, 120,000 km of high voltage network and over 60,000 km of low voltage network.
Like most utilities, Ergon uses a large number of applications including stores (inventory), time sheeting, work order maintenance, report production, design calculations, civil design, networks maps, generation design, zone substation design, operating schematics, zone substation control, zone substation maintenance, outage notifications, connectivity, customer usage, customer management, billing, load management, load profiling, network operation, outage management, network planning, demand management, environmental reporting, network model creation, distribution network design, on demand mapping, asset visualizations, inspection corrections, asset inspection, maintenance planning, asset maintenance, asset register, and purchasing system, to name a few.
Similarly to most utility companies, Ergon uses a number of different COTS and in-house developed systems, including a GIS (GE Smallworld), ERP (Ellipse), outage management (FdrStat), customer management (Facom), document/drawing Management (IBM Document Manager), network planning (DINIS), zone substation maintenance (SCAMS), customer connection management (CMM), asset inspection (Mapguide 6.5), and design (Autodesk, Bentley and Smallworld products).
Single Point of Truth
Early on Ergon decided to centralize their information repository around an spatial RDBMS. To manage information flow, Ergon uses several technologies including Insync to move data between GE Smallworld and Oracle, Oracle triggers, which are used to move and transform data between systems in a timely manner, JIF which is a process to extract data from Facom into Oracle, enterprise application integration (EAI), which is used to manage data flow between systems through a systems API, and FDO which is used to integrate Autodesk applications and data.
Rule Based Design
Ergon has developed a network design tool which allows a user to do network design work using any AutoCAD based software platform (AutoCAD, AutoCAD Map 3D, and AutoCAD Civil 3D, etc) and which enforces all of Ergon’s design and data rules. Rules include business rules, for example, network design objects must be in the GIS prior to energization. Another business rule requires that designs must use approved compatible units. Design rules include attribute constraints and Ergon CAD standards for layers, symbology, and scales.
CAD/GIS Integration
Previously network maps were produced in Smallworld, but this was time consuming because the extent of each map and the labelling of each map had to be manually defined. Using AutoCAD Map 3D together with data queried from Oracle Spatial means that joins can are done within Oracle and stored as Oracle views and standard display styles are saved as layers in AutoCAD Map 3D.
By having all of the asset information available within Oracle Spatial allows Ergon Energy to produce complex maps combining data from various systems. An example is a thematic map showing all overhead copper conductors. To do this with Oracle Spatial involves a simple SQL statement joining tables together within a view. Once the view is created, the user then simply connects to the view within AutoCAD Map 3D, themes the layer as required, and uses the AutoCAD Map Book function to produce automatically a series of map prints. Web-based Access
Access to data stored in the central Oracle repository is provided by Mapguide Enterprise-based web applications. A key advantage of a web approach is that web applications can be developed and deployed rapidly. An example is a report showing customer power usage. Ergon has found that Web access to data has resulted in a dramatic increase in office and field workers taking ownership of the data which has improved data quality.
You can find Mark's presentation and material at the Autodesk University web site.
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I saw his course materials. How does Ergon make those connections to google earth. Was that through MapGuide?
Posted by: kraused | December 07, 2009 at 04:36 PM
We use a number of different ways to place layers in google. For background layers (photograph, DEM, etc) we use Google's Fusion, for layers that require real time data we use wms/wfs's from mapguide and for adhoc 3d modelling & time sliding info we use FME. If you would like more info please email.
Posted by: mark | December 08, 2009 at 05:59 PM