serguei.sokolov@autodesk.

com


Finding a Single Point of Truth


S. SOKOLOV
1
, D. LASLO
2
, J. MARTIN
2
, H. THIJSSEN
1

Autodesk Canada
1
(CAN),

Autodesk Inc
2
(US)
SUMMARY

Data flow within the Utility business process can be very complex, especially considering the various
systems and solutions that need to communicate by providing or receiving information from one
another. The trend in the industry has been to endure redundancy of data input and maintenance of
multiple copies of the same data across various solution data sets. Attempts to improve the situation
with point to point interfaces have helped, but with the tools and solutions available today, a Single
Point of Truth can be achieved. Built around a Data Warehouse concept, consolidated and validated
data can be published into the Data Warehouse at the right point in the process, making the
information available to all other enterprise systems and solutions. Using the Initiate-Plan-Execute-
Close Utility Workflow model, this paper will explore how the Single Point of Truth Spatial Data
Warehouse and process automation services can be configured to streamline the flow of data within
the Utility business process.


















KEYWORDS

Spatial Data Warehouse, GIS, Initiate-Plan-Execute-Close IPEC workflow, business process
management


CIGR Canada
21, rue dArtois, F-75008 PARIS
CIGRE-121 Conference on Power Systems
http : //www.cigre.org
Vancouver, October 17- 19, 2010

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1. INTRODUCTION

Many Electric Power Systems (Utilities) are responsible for maintenance and operations of millions of
electrical assets across large territories. In managing these responsibilities, the Utilities place a high
priority on public and employee safety, service reliability and compliance with laws and regulations.
New installations, upgrade/maintenance of existing infrastructure and emergency work result in
changes to the electric assets and network. This unprecedented work volume requires Utilities to
develop best-practice business processes and state of the art technologies to assist in managing the
Initiate-Plan-Execute-Close (IPEC) workflow.

So what is a Utility to do? Innovate for efficiency and effective power system management and obtain
enhanced capabilities in meeting their Safety, Reliability, and Compliance obligations. In recent years,
Utilities' interest has moved from facility mapping to infrastructure management and related location-
intelligence decision-support frameworks [2,4]. Spatial Data Warehouse (SDW) and process
automation technologies provide a foundation for such frameworks. Many Utilities see the SDW as a
key part of their enterprise information management (EIM) strategies, as well as an enabler of more-
advanced asset analysis and service delivery management functionality such as outage management
/ distribution management systems (OMS/DMS).

2. GEOSPATIAL CHALLENGES
The problem Utilities face today is not a lack of information, but finding what is needed when it is
needed and trusting that the information is correct.

Nearly everything Utilities do has a geospatial aspect. Today, Utilities are collecting data at every
level of their business and in volumes that in the past were unimaginable: SCADA, Smart Metering
and Smart Grid initiatives, LIDAR and other 3D imagery surveys produce large volumes of data. Data
about assets is stored in different database systems or in files with distinctive formats, all reflecting
business process, application, program software, or information type dependencies. Ability to leverage
these data sources along with traditional data sources concurrently allows the Utility to begin to focus
spend on reliability improvements to achieve the greatest benefit. Adding to this complexity is the
distribution of these data sets across the enterprise in silos requiring a varied set of tools and/or
specialized business rules for data transformation, classification, matching, and integration [4]. In
many cases, separate business units (for example, distribution mapping and property records) may
maintain records in different coordinate systems and/or referencing different commercial or
proprietary landbases. This, of course, leads to duplicate data maintained in multiple systems
throughout a company, often with suspect data quality [3].

Many Utilities have attempted to make Geographic Information System (GIS) a foundation of Utility
EIM to drive other core applications through interfaces and links to work management, including
mobile devices, outage management systems, network planning (load flows), energy management
systems/supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), design/estimating, and Customer
Relationship Management (CRM). The challenge is that this locks EIM to a specific GIS
implementation and requires development and support of numerous point-to-point interfaces which is
time-consuming and costly.

Utilities are finding that, as they depend more on IT solutions to drive business performance, data
quality and data governance becomes critical to that success [3]. The most critical challenge is the
data trust by users. Users often ask questions how do I find all the relevant data about a device?
What system provides the most current and reliable data? Low data quality, unreliable links between
systems resulting in difficulties in finding correct information plagues Utilities. It is critical therefore,
to establish a single point of truth for all physical, electrical and spatial data attributes a data store
that will not only consolidate Utilities data but will also provide indicators of data quality and
reliability.

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3. APPROACH
There is no silver bullet solution that will solve data and IPEC process challenges entirely. Today
however, Utilities can adopt a hybrid approach leveraging existing data maintenance systems (Source
systems) while establishing a desired single point of truth data source available to all enterprise
users and applications (Figure 1). The key aspects of the approach are:
Selecting industry standard RDBMS capable of supporting spatial data types and directly
associating geo-spatial properties as attributes at the database level
Validating and consolidating all relevant physical, electrical and spatial attributes from the
Source systems in a single spatial data repository the Spatial Data Warehouse
Leveraging investment in existing data maintenance systems and implementing business
process management / events driven architecture integrating systems in a unified business
process
Referencing a single landbase and utilizing the strength of data fusion with 3D imagery
Providing a generic GIS Viewer to spatially enable Business Intelligence (BI) tools accessing
the Spatial Data Warehouse
Although the approach has the spatial aspect directly in its core - this approach is not necessarily
GIS centric but rather based on the industrys best practices and EAI implementation experience. Data
changes are continually merged into the SDW from many sources (including commercial landbase and
imagery). This is done using data integrity and quality services configured using a middle-tier
framework of services and relies on Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) tools to validate and transform
data to a common model. Sharing landbase and other relevant data via a standard data access interface
provides a common spatial reference and addresses scalability of the solution by eliminating run-time
data access to the Source systems data is pre-processed and readily available from the SDW.

Users will have confidence that the data used for a particular application is consistent and fits for the
purpose at the time of use thus addressing the core business objectives of safety, reliability and
compliance.


Service Bus
Process
Auto
mation
Source Systems
Assets
Mgmt
Design &
Mapping
Other
GIS, CRM,
Finance
OMS /
DMS Spatial Data
Warehouse
Data
Marts
Data
Marts
Services Infrastructure
Business Applications
Data
Maintenance
Data
Visualization
Data
Analysis
Data Manager Other
Services
Consolidated Data
ODS
Events
Processing
2D/3D
Imagery

Figure 1: Solution Architecture
How does this approach work?
Historically, the design process has been assumed to drive nearly all major updates to a
Utilitys facility data, with minor updates flowing in as mapping updates. While the design
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solution is critical to the facilities update process, it should not impede the process by forcing
all updates to flow through the design/ Planning stage of the IPEC workflow. The trick is to
clearly define systems that are responsible for each particular data attribute throughout the
IPEC workflow, and to only allow those particular data attributes to be updated by those
governing Source systems. Those updates can only occur at the appropriate point in the IPEC
workflow, and the final post to as-built can only occur when each governing Source systems
transaction has completed.
The Source systems (e.g. Asset Management, Design, Mapping, Customer information
management, Finance and Workorder management, OMS/DMS, Scheduling, GIS) all
maintain operational data using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) interfaces / tools. Each
source system then publishes important and relevant data about facilities and the
distribution network as-built state into the Spatial Data Warehouse. The publishing process
preserves links between facilities using system-wide IDs.
Facilities in the SDW are stored in their normal operating as-built state. Users looking for
design in progress data will have to work with the appropriate Source systems.
The SDW houses a commercial landbase covering the entire service territory. The landbase
data will be available for direct access from all Source systems in a read-only mode and
should be refreshed on a periodic basis. The SDW also makes available to other systems
Utilitys boundaries (usually maintained by the GIS) and new subdivision parcels that have
not been integrated in to the commercial landbase.
The SDW will merge four primary categories of the vital information about an electric facility:
1. Physical characteristics of facilities/assets (information about assets including associated
documents)
2. Geographic location (real-world coordinates of the facility) and other locations (like
symbols placement on a schematic map) as continuous / seamless map of the entire
service territory
3. Electrical network connectivity
4. Site-specific conditions (information about the site)
The SDW will not be edited directly by users or business applications. Any updates will be
made within the Source systems that own the data.
As a result of the above characteristics, the SDW will provide a consolidated, single point of truth
database that can be accessed by all business applications with standards based interfaces either via a
direct data connection (if supported by business applications) or via middle-tier services. This
approach also supports visualization of as-built data together with 3D imagery thus providing a close
to the real-world view. Moreover, the SDW will allow analyzing Utility network assets, complex data
structures, discover trends, and create comprehensive reports on the state of the electric network.


4. TECHNOLOGY ASPECTS
Implementing a SDW requires a database technology capable of supporting spatial data types (such as
Oracle Spatial or SQL Server) and storing location information (geospatial or otherwise), such as
longitudes and latitudes, in the same tables and rows as the rest of the data. Using standard SQL, users
and applications can then extract spatial data and perform spatial queries on the same data. This
approach allows the spatial data stored in the database to be separated from the processing logic
included in the GIS software. Taking advantage of such capabilities the SDW may store multiple
locations (in various coordinate systems) of facilities in the distribution network. For example, in
facilities mapping and design systems, users may place facilities (as map symbols) at the correct
geographic location, while in circuit mapping users may want to create a schematic representation by
placing symbols that represent the same facilities on an offset location as required by mapping
standards. Therefore, in the SDW, a facility (device/structure) may have two (or more) geometries
associated with it one for its real-world location (registered with GPS, for example) and others
reflecting mapping locations as per the drafting / mapping standards enforced by the Utility. The
key is that there will be only one record representing the facility in the SDW. As the result, this same
record can be visualized differently by business applications. It is important therefore that the
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selected GIS Viewer is capable of supporting multiple geometries associated to one record. Users
should be able to select an appropriate view to display facilities on top of the commercial landbase.

Another major component in building a SDW for Utilities is the Operational Data Store (ODS). In the
approach, an ODS is a database that serves two purposes: it makes integration of data from multiple
Source systems easier and it stores non-critical operational data. Only non-critical operational data is
published. For the most current operational data, enterprise systems (including field mobile) still
should query OMS / DMS directly. However, OMS/DMS can share information about the current as-
operating state of the network, as well as identification and restoration of service outages by
publishing such data to ODS thus dramatically reducing load on the Source system and making data
available to others. The ODS is primarily used by the ETL publishing process to consolidate data. It
can also provide access to some published non-critical operational data (e.g. work in progress, field
crew locations, current outage data) that will not be published to the SDW. In simple terms, a typical
ODS may contain days of information in various stages (e.g. work in progress), while the SDW
contains the most current, validated data in the as-built state and years of historic data. Publishing
data is very important concept of the approach it actually guaranties predictable system performance
for data query and analysis and is a foundation for overall system scalability. It is important to
highlight that the approach does not depend on any specific ETL vendor tool (such as SAP
BusinessObjects Data Integrator, Informatica, Oracle Data Integrator, Safe FME) the
processes of data publishing is completely decoupled thus providing greater flexibility in system
configuration.

Unfortunately, most Utilities have yet to realize the benefits of accessing the SDW and applying
geographic business intelligence due to a common misconception that GIS tools are required for the
information management of spatial data. However, the data processing limitations imposed through
traditional GIS prevent organizations from quickly and easily accessing, manipulating, analyzing, and
comparing data, both spatial and non-spatial, from anywhere in their enterprise [4].

The data consolidation process relies on the established Common Model (a derivative from CIM -
Common Information Model [5]) to semantically integrate data using common class definitions
(including attributes and relationships), domain values and interface data access contracts. The
Common Model metadata is maintained by ETL tools or other specialized middle-tier components. All
Source systems posting data updates to an ODS must map model and domain values to the Common
Model elements. The SDW model inherits some of the Common Model elements but it is tuned for
efficient queries execution and analytical support (including spatial analysis).

In the approach, the SDW should support two business purposes providing:
a single point of truth for as-built network records and
support for business intelligence (BI) tools
Therefore a logical model of the SDW is a composition of two models: the as-built distribution
network logical model that includes a subset of the Common Model (without operational data),
extended assets data, landbase classes and supporting BI logical model that can be modeled as assets
or location centric or combination.

Today Utilities have to deal with a distributed environment where a higher degree of local autonomy is
needed to achieve organizational agility. The approach includes middleware components to manage
data updates and relies on Business Process Management (BPM) component to model, execute, and
monitor business processes on a specific process model. Each business process model clearly defines
the rules and exceptions governing the process steps that are performed by people or systems in
response to specific business events. The events disseminate incremental changes in business state
throughout the enterprise; thus presenting an effective alternative of achieving data consistency,
reduced latency in updates, as opposed to trying to facilitate data integration in the process layer
[1].The approach is not bound to a particular middle-tier framework as most commercial frameworks
(such as SAP NetWeaver, IBM Websphere or Oracle Fusion) support the required infrastructure
services.
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Situational awareness is especially important for
Utilities where poor decisions may lead to
serious consequences from a safety and also a
customer service perspective. From the customer
service perspective, a Utility employee receiving
a customer call can explore the actual image of
the customers location, including the Utilitys
physical assets in the area (Figure 2). Imagine a
case where the Utility has a field crew changing
out a transformer on a street, and a customer on
that same street calls in reporting a power
outage. A common mistake would be to assume
that the outage is related to and caused by the
work the field crew is doing.
With the ability to view the physical assets in the
field, it is possible to view even the details of the
secondary network open points between the
transformers (Figure 3, [6]). This allows the person
receiving the call to correctly assess the situation
potentially avoiding a frustrated customer whose
power is not restored when the field crew has
completed their work and is gone from the location.
The assessment described above is possible
regardless of whether the secondary network is
mapped in the GIS or not. From the safety
perspective, dispatchers can warn field employees
of potential hazards to be aware of even in cases
where the field crew may be arriving on-site after
dark, since the dispatcher has a clear image taken
during daylight.

This powerful data fusion of 3D imagery (such as from Earthmine and Pictometry [6]) with facilities
records in the SDW greatly improves situational awareness of users. Users can create better situation
assessment plans before arriving on the location. Using geographically indexed panoramic or oblique
imagery overlayed with the Utilities data, users can identify risks or complications from the office and
equip the field crew for the situation at hand. For example, high resolution 3D imagery, whether
captured from the ground or from air, allows measuring the height of poles or distance from a pole to
building and much more!
The Approach mandates that everything referenced in the SDW data will be relevant and compliant as
much as possible with the single point of truth concept. While incremental updates from the Source
systems (in vector and tabular formats data) can maintain this state - imagery (raster format) and
video streams cannot be re-surveyed each time the as-built state of the network is changed to reflect
the most current situation in the field. To address this challenge, special symbols can be overlayed
while viewing imagery and video to rectify the scene to be as close to the as-built state as possible. For
example if a pole has been removed since the imagery was captured a special symbol (like red
cross or REMOVED label) can be displayed right on top of the poles image in the composition
scene indicating that situation has changed. Keeping all the SDW data sources in sync greatly
improves users trust in the data. More trust, and therefore more dependence on the data by users has
a positive snowball effect of those users taking more ownership and responsibility for data quality
and correctness. Under those conditions, users finding a transformer in the field whose KVA is
incorrect are more likely to submit a correction, which can then flow to the system that has governance
over that particular data attribute for transformers (likely SAP or some other serialized asset register).
Once the governing Source system has been updated, the SDW will then reflect the corrected
Figure 2: 3D street level view (Earthmine)
Figure 3: Improving Situational Awareness with high-
resolution imagery (Earthmine)
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information. Data governance decisions must address areas such as operations efficiency, compliance
with regulations, protection of assets, and operational resiliency.

5. CONCLUSION
The IPEC workflow can provide a valuable framework for management of Utility asset data by clearly
defining the data attributes that can be populated during specific stages of the business process, and
which systems should have ownership and governance of those particular data attributes. A single
point of truth SDW provides the one source where all data consumers can look for the information
they require. Adoption of systems and solutions that can function with and be controlled by the IPEC
workflow, and coupling those systems with the Spatial Data Warehouse that reflects the correct
attributes as updated by the governing Source systems a single point of truth, can provide
significant improvement for Utility operations. This recommended hybrid approach enables the
Utility IPEC workflow by:
Creating a consolidated view for all physical, electrical, and spatial data in a single spatial data
repository the Spatial Data Warehouse
Providing predictable data quality
Supporting a vendor neutral implementation platform and a common data model
Leveraging existing best of breed data maintenance systems and integrating these source
systems at the data and functional levels
Sharing common landbase and powerful compositions of 3D imagery with other published
enterprise data
Users will know that the data used for a particular application is consistent and fit for the purpose at
the time of use thus addressing the core business objectives of safety, reliability and compliance.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

[1] Using Events in Highly Distributed Architectures, David Chou, The Architecture Journal, Microsoft, 2008
[2] Market Scope for Energy and Utility Geographic Information Systems, Bradley Williams, Jeff Vining,
Gartner, 2009
[3] Measuring Utility Geographic Information System Implementations: An Enterprise GIS and Best-Practice
Survey, Bradley Williams, Gartner, 2008
[4] Driving Business Value with Geographic Business Intelligence, David Loshin, www.knowledge-
integrity.com, 2010
[5] The Common Information Model for Distribution, Electric Power Research Institute, 2008
[6] Earthmine (http://www.earthmine.com), Pictometry (www.pictometry.com)