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In a bid to reduce inconvenience caused to the consumers by the impact of planned and unplanned outages and incidents, Rinfra implemented India’s first GIS based Outage Management System (OMS) in Mumbai. By Mehak Chawla
Prashun Dutta, Senior Executive Vice President, IT and Quality at Reliance Infrastructure Ltd., is confident that RInfra’s 27 lakh suburban consumers will now get quicker response because of faster fault identification. RInfra’s distribution business is spread across a large geographical area. This creates lots of challenges related to outage information and quick identification of faults. Since power cables are laid underground, identifying and locating an affected area is a key factor in the quick resolution of outages that reduce customer inconvenience and enhance satisfaction.
A pioneer in implementing the latest technologies in power distribution in order to provide uninterrupted quality power to consumers, RInfra’s Mumbai Distribution Business implemented a Geographical Information System (GIS)-based Outage Management System (OMS). This system was developed by integrating various other IT systems, such as Interactive Voice Response System (IVR), Customer Information/Billing System, GIS, ERP and SCADA.
Scope of the project
During outages, it is critical for a power distribution company to restore electricity within the shortest span of time. An OMS consists of computer-based tools and utility procedures. It can be used to efficiently and effectively detect and diagnose outages. The system also provides feedback to affected customers, dispatch repair crews, restores power, maintains historical outage records and computes statistical indices on electrical outages.
To design, develop and implement an integrated OMS, Reliance Infrastructure implemented India’s first GIS based OMS for Mumbai Power distribution. The system has 20,000 km of High Tension (HT) & Low Tension (LT) underground cable network and almost 200 OMS users that includes Customer Service Representatives, Shift engineers & Supervisors, Managers etc., spread across 384 sq km of Mumbai Suburbs, catering to 2.8 million consumers.
Infrastructure deployed
The utility deployed ten high-end servers. Since, it has a data intensive operation, it needed SAN arrays of 2 TB each. The GIS system deployed at RInfra was from Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc, USA, which uses ArcSDE for facilitating storage and management of spatial data in leading commercial RDBMS.
The Software used was GIS-hosted OMS that leverages .NET and ASP technologies to enable trouble call and outage incident management in a Web-based, scalable and configurable desktop environment. The Responder Trouble Call Analysis (TCA) Engine uses a sophisticated and iterative prediction algorithm to determine which interruptible network device caused an outage.
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Challenges faced
While using technologies for an unconventional purpose, there are always challenges. One of the biggest challenges was accurate data creation and updation for a dynamic LT network. This was a huge task due to the large geographical spread of the network and configuration of a huge number of LT feeders for tracing from substation panel to service points.
Another huge challenge was integration of available systems into one for achieving the objective of diagnosing, locating and repairing the network in the shortest possible period so as to reduce inconvenience to consumers. Other challenges involved requirement for land base data and updation, timely availability of complete energy auditing data and validation of spatial data by the users of GIS and SAP.
“The GIS based OMS project was successfully deployed in 2011. We are currently using the system with amazing results. All five zones are online in real time with the stabilizing process in progress,” commented Dutta.
A major part of the project was done in-house with some collaboration with Telvent Miner & Miner’s Responder solution.
Benefits derived
The benefits of utilizing GIS for Outage Management are manifold. The duration of outage is reduced due to quick response based on the problem location identification and correction. It provides information to key stakeholders (consumers, emergency officials, etc.) about the outage as it is integrated with SCADA and GIS. Similarly, progress of restoration is also available through the system. Using GIS based OMS, the response resolution time to consumer complaints significantly reduced.
GIS based OMS also reduced the outage frequency due to use of outage statistics for making targeted reliability improvements. The historic data available helps identify and rectify patches in the network that are vulnerable to faults and this, in turn, has helped increase the mean time between failures. Using historical data and analytics, Rinfra could also better plan its network for minimizing the incidence of outages.
“In the future, we are looking at the possibility of integrating the OMS with a mobile data system. This integration will allow for outage predictions to be automatically sent to crews in the field on their PDAs and they in turn will update the OMS status with information such as estimated restoration time and other details,” he added.
With respect to mobile technology, RInfra recently launched Mobile View & Payment facility. OMS can also be integrated with Automated Meter Reading (AMR) for consumer outage detection, serving as virtual calls for consumers who are affected even before they lodge a complaint.
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