Interviews Exploring the Role of GIS in the Enterprise
Written by Matt Ball Sunday, 10 May 2009 16:44
ESRI fashioned a bold move toward enterprise geospatial capabilities four years ago when they announced the ArcGIS Server product and accompanying web services. The embrace of distributed enterprise computing makes geospatial data far more ubiquitous in an organization and reaches far more users. V1 Magazine editor Matt Ball recently spoke with Bill Meehan, director, Utilities Solutions at ESRI about the enterprise geospatial approach and the promise of geospatial contributions for smart grid development.
V1: How has the use of GIS evolved over the years for a large electric utility?
Meehan: There are four patterns of GIS that include data management, analytics, visualization, and mobility; bringing in data from the field. For many years, GIS has been mostly about making really nice maps, on the desktop. The maps may be compiled using spatial analysis, but they had been created by GIS professionals, who had a history within the mapmaking departments of utilities.
Utilities have been using maps for years, to find out where their things are. It’s mostly about locating equipment, without much analysis. The maps were maintained by the engineering organization, and weren’t often viewed by senior management, operations, or customer care people. Strategists wouldn’t see much value in the maps because they were drawn in an engineering way. In order to read them you have to understand the symbology and presentation. Besides the maps were just recreations of what people already knew. They provide no new insights or discoveries.
Having worked in an engineering area for many years, I felt comfortable with the symbology although some of the maps were pretty hard to figure out. How do I trace this circuit or what’s going on? But, rarely, if ever were these maps used for analysis.
For example, in the planning department, next door, down the corridor, in another building or another floor, the planning people might take the physical maps to figure out something, but then they would move on to another system. They might project the load out for a year, or look at the maintenance history. The maps were just a side to the process, starting and ending with a map, but never using the map for analysis.
About four years ago, our folks starting to think about GIS not just as a mapping application but as a framework or a foundation of technology -- almost like Maximo or SAP or Oracle or other foundational technology. So we created the idea of our GIS server, which really took us out of the laboratory, the science projects, and little mapping departments into the enterprise. ArcGIS Server changes the game from a departmental application to an information foundation. All departments in the organization can benefit, not just the engineers and operations people.
V1: How does the ArcGIS Server approach enable an enterprise?
Meehan: As the ArcGIS Server evolved, and the Internet became more popular, we started to talk about serving up information. The server allows us to take our financial system, and our customer system, or our material system, and put it in the GIS or the other way around. All the system boundaries disappear when you begin to say, “Let’s publish data and functionality from the GIS through an integration framework and do the same with other systems.”
So, if I’m a utility worker with a handheld device in the field, I can look at SCADA data, financial information, customer information and all on a map because the utility is publishing that information. I can see something on my handheld device that helps me perform maintenance based on customer complaints. I can make the changes on the handheld device and some of the data might go into a maintenance management system, some of the data would go into GIS, some of the data would go to the financial center.
What I’m seeing in my hand is not a GIS application it’s a business application that just happens to have lots of GIS functional elements. If I’m an executive or general manager, I can view that information in a dashboard, and quickly see what’s interesting, or not interesting, or bad, or good.
In the old days GIS was managed by engineering and IT didn’t get very heavily involved, but now GIS is becoming an IT pillar.
V1: What are the kinds of questions that an enterprise GIS can answer?
Meehan: A utility spends a ton of money trimming trees. Why are we trimming trees? We’ve always trimmed trees. That’s what we do. We trim trees because trees fall and impact our lines. But how effective is that tree trimming? Because we’ve measured our reliability statistics in one system, and we know what money we’ve spent in another system, and we combine these with GIS to see where the work was done, we can put the pieces together.
Maybe I have made a decision to trim trees every four years whether they need it or not. Why don’t I bring in historic rainfall information because if it’s raining a lot, trees are going to grow faster or if I’ve got a drought the trees aren’t growing?
We spent a lot of money, and maybe our reliability improved, but without GIS we don’t know if our reliability improved where we actually spent the money. So, now you’re beginning to make more intelligent decisions about what’s happening, and spending money on what’s really effective.
Now I can begin to fine tune my inspection and maintenance program using technology that brings together different pieces. The common denominator is location, geography, especially in a road network, water network, electric network, or telephone network.
V1: With GIS no longer just desktop centric, you’re pushing implementation more to the developer community. What’s happening in terms of the web GIS approach, with open APIs for more custom development?
Meehan: We still think of the desktop as an extremely valuable tool because it’s the “authoring” mechanism. It’s really the place where you create the data. It’s designed for heads down hard work or really complex analysis.
Once that data is created and managed through a database, then it can be published throughout the whole enterprise. That’s either on the Web or by a mobile device, you’re not putting complex analysis tools or complex drafting or design tools in front of people who are not trained for it. We figure in an organization like the mid-sized transit authority, that there will be thirty or so desktop users, but everybody in the organization from the administration to the general manager can look at GIS data and know what’s going on. The web is about socializing the GIS.
I think some companies are probably worried that if we charge by the desktop license, but put the functionality on the web, like free data, that we’re going to lose money. But we’re selling a server, and now we’re enabling more people to use the technology. This in turn creates more value for the organization and the need for spatial data increases. Sw we’ll have just as many desktop users, probably more, and we’ll likely have twenty times or forty or a hundred times as many people looking at the data. It’s not just GIS data any more, it’s the company’s data.
V1: Are utilities embracing the idea of enterprise GIS?
Meehan: Back in the old days, when Edison was creating the first electric company, utilities didn’t have many suppliers. They had to invent everything. When I was with Boston Edison, we had our own blacksmith operation where they built things that they needed. Today, of course, that’s no longer the case, but what that culture created was an environment of everything we do, we create, we manage and we don’t tend to look outside the organization. With the Internet, it all changes and becomes more about access to data outside the organization.
One very simple example would be an electrician that’s been hired to put in an ATM in a mall. So you have to go to city hall and get a wiring permit, you walk in and you tell them who you are, you tell them where the project is and then they’ll issue a permit. The electrician then has to call the power company to schedule a new service for the ATM. The electrician repeats all the same information he gave to the city hall for the wiring inspector. Then the utility has to come out and install the service.
What if the city hall published a web service so that you don’t even have to call? The electric company automatically receives your wiring permit, and maybe a scanned image of the plot plan. The electric company checks the load, they give a price while you’re online, and they schedule the work and let you know right then when the service can be installed.
I was in a little country in Europe and asked, “How long does it take between the time when I call the electric company and when people get their service? They said, “Six weeks.” Are you kidding me? Isn’t it realistic to expect that in a few days or later that day the service can be installed? For simple services where the infrastructure is adequate, there’s no technological reason why this can’t be simpler and faster. It’s all about collaboration and communication.
Another example, is an inspection on a highway culvert. To look at a culvert that means I have to drive a truck or get an off-road vehicle and drive through an area. Do you know if there’s a vegetated wetland out there? If there is, you’re not allowed to drive a truck over that. If you do, you have to replicate that wetland and you’ll probably get fined. So wouldn’t it be nice to be able to access vegetated wetland delineations over the Web before that inspection work or have that information available on your mobile device? Before you get into trouble from an environmental inspection, you want to look outside of your organization to see.
An enterprise is good within the enterprise, but we need to think about broadening data that’s available. We need to create an open system where information can facilitate productivity.
V1: I get excited about the opportunity of the smart grid. I know you’ve written and talked about the geospatial opportunities with these new systems that combine communications with the electrical grid. How can GIS exploit all of the data that the smart grid will generate?
Meehan: Every new smart meter is going to be polled at some interval. Today most commercial and industrial customers have interval meters. That means they’ll have a meter that has internal storage, so they’ll read the meter every fifteen minutes (the interval), storing it locally on the meter like a little hard drive and then every month they’ll come in and tap into that data within the billing system.. With the new Smart Grid concept, interval metering will be extended to every residential customer. When you do this, the utility can have real time access to load information for everyone. In addition, the new smart meters are designed to communicate to equipment inside the customer’s facility. In other words, utilities will have the ability to manage customer’s individual loads, like freezers or air conditioners.
How a utility is going to manage the data is going to be a really interesting problem because the amount of data that they currently manage is based on the number of meters. Now, they’re going to have all their meters times every fifteen minutes a day, so it’s going to be a lot of data. That data will be managed by the meter-data management part of the smart grid.
I think from a GIS perspective we’re not going to manage all that data. I expect that that data will be pre-processed in some meaningful way. GIS is going to provide visualization for the management of the infrastructure, because the infrastructure has to be modeled if you’re going to be able to turn on and off switches based on customer demand.
V1: What are the benefits of smart grid technology?
Meehan: I see four main benefits from the smart grid. The first is to reduce carbon emissions by reducing peak demand, the second is the creation of a self-healing system, the third is the monitoring of the health of the system, and the fourth is the integration of renewable energy into the system.
We want to figure out how to better manage the grid to try to flatten the peak demand because not all generators are equal. You have an efficient base unit and a pretty efficient but more expensive intermediate unit, and then an inefficient power source that you drag out of the woodwork whenever you really run into trouble. The last resort is the most expensive with high carbon content that has a real negative impact on greenhouse gases. To avoid this peak demand, I can flatten that out by looking at customer behavior and modifying it, and smart meters are a good first step.
They talk about a self-healing grid and this is the ability for the electric system to respond automatically, which it doesn’t do today. Everybody thinks that when the power is out, that the company knows, but it doesn’t. When you get a power failure right now, what happens is the utility, gets a bunch of customers calling in, they do a quick analysis to discover the most likely location of the problem, they dispatch a crew, drive the circuit before they actually find out what’s going on. With the smart grid, with all the additional sensors, you’re getting a whole new sense of where the customers are located, so that you can make quick assessments and reroute the network to reduce the number of customers affected by an outage. Instead of having a thousand customers out for thirty minutes before you figure out manually how to switch around the problem, you’ll have a handful of customers out while the utility repairs the problem.
In the old days to understand the health of the system, we used the ancient form of communication that the Native Americans used, which is smoke signals. We knew a transformer blew up because it had smoke pouring out of it. Whereas, today, under the smart grid scenario, we will know of a potential failure before it’s going to happen because we see indications. A key component of the Smart Grid is the sensor network. Today, there are only a few sensors on the electric system. This sophisticated sensor network will be able to sense problems emerging, like a transformer that is overload, before the transformer fails.
The integration of renewable energy into the electrical grid poses a problem system wnen the percentage of these sources become significant. Today renewable resources represent a very small percentage of generation into the grid. Most renewable energy sources are intermittent, like solar and wind energy, so you never really know when they will be available. Right now, the electric system makes up the slack when the sun isn’t shining, but as you start to build that generation to say 20% then when you get a cloudy day or if the wind stops blowing, that’s going to be a big problem and you’re going to have to figure out how to adjust to that. The control element of smart grid will be able to manage that.
V1: Right now, GIS doesn’t do a lot of simulation or pre-planning. Do you see that as a direction for the technology?
Meehan: Absolutely. I think of smart grid as an advanced control system, like a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) on steroids. It’s just more points of information, and more control. In order for it to operate, it needs lots of other data. It needs data about the configuration of the network and network transactions, because the configuration of the electric system changes all the time. GIS basically becomes part of the information infrastructure, and I would see the GIS continuously feeding new transactions.
At the same time, the smart grid system is producing a great deal of new information, but it’s not an analysis or visualization tool. GIS becomes the visualization tool. Now I can look at customer behavior and do load forecasting. You don’t have to build situational awareness into the smart grid control system because it’s really about capturing the data. GIS provides situational awareness by doing the analytics on the data and then visualizing it for making decisions.
V1: In this early phase of experimentation, there are some specialized companies that are attacking different pieces of the system. What are some of the first opportunities for GIS?
Meehan: It is going to take a long time to build the Smart Grid. It may take utilities years, and it’s expensive. GIS is a great tool for construction and project management. So, GIS helps the roll out of smart grid so that it can be done in a more logical, intelligent way. You can use the GIS to monitor progress, manage work crews, and route crews to the work.
Logically, I would probably put in smart meters in places that are the most expensive to read those meters like in urban area that have population that’s coming and going a lot or in area that have inaccessible meter reading in basements, or in areas where there is high crime, where I don’t want to be poking around. GIS will help utilities put them in areas that have the highest bang for the buck.
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