Consolidating Siloed GIS Data and Processes for Strategic Benefit

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1 Consolidating Siloed GIS Data and Processes for Strategic Benefit John Marshall, Hydro One Networks Hydro One Networks Inc.

2 Overview Hydro One Networks is in the midst of a major GIS consolidation effort for its Distribution data. This involves various lines of business SMEs working together under the guidance of a GIS Project Manager/Specialist. Over the past decade, Hydro One has developed multiple, siloed GIS systems, databases and business processes separately supporting individual business needs, including GIS-based design and layout, outage response management, Distribution system planning, and data management for our Smart Meter program. Our Final Destination GIS project has the following objectives: consolidating numerous geospatial data repositories, consolidating business processes for authoring, maintaining and consuming the geospatial data. The resultant consolidated database will support multiple ongoing and proposed initiatives including integrated enterprise asset management, distribution planning, business analytics and BI, and the Hydro One smart grid initiative, Advanced Distribution System, which enables distributed generation, advanced metering and a modern Distribution Management System

3 GIS at Hydro One The FD GIS system is an integral part of Hydro One s information management strategy. By integrating GIS into other business processes, Hydro One will be able to further leverage the technology to derive additional business value. Vision - 3 -

4 With a service territory that extends fully across the Province of Ontario; with assets including ~1000 Distribution substations and over 3000 Distribution feeders, supported by approximately 2 million poles; maintenance of spatial data for Distribution Facilities has historically been challenging for Hydro One. Something of an understatement - 4 -

5 Showing my age here Historically, hand drafted Area Maps on linen, vellum and paper were used to capture and display Distribution facilities quite accurately, using scales in the range of 1:2400 1:3600. Thousands of these maps were maintained for decades by regionally-distributed drafting groups, which interacted directly with field forces for data updates. During the 1990 s, due to high maintenance costs and a perceived lack of value, these maps were retired and investigation into GIS based systems began

6 Remember Leroy lettering sets? - 6 -

7 Dawn of the Modern Era By 2005, and with several separate Distribution geospatial data repositories already in existence at Hydro One (more on these later), the company recognized a growing need for an advanced, spatially accurate, complete, fully network connected facility model of our Distribution system, to be housed and maintained within a single centralized GIS. But what would be the best approach for populating this GIS?? - 7 -

8 Our novel approach Our regulatory requirements dictate that utilities must visit and check each facility in their service territory for defects at least once every 6 years i.e. Asset Condition Assessment (ACA) program Hydro One recognized in this an opportunity: at a relatively small incremental cost, to also collect spatially accurate facility data, pole by pole, during these ACA site visits, and to use this data in development of our new Distribution GIS

9 The Six Year DxAIS Project The result was the development of a field data collection application installed on GPS-equipped tablet PC s, and a back end ACA database to house both the collected asset facility information, and the asset condition assessment data. About 100 Powerline Maintainers were trained as data collectors and deployed in 2005 for year 1 of the 6 year data collection program. As of March 2011, this program continues and is nearing 98% completion

10 DxAIS has another component: a GIS Loader During 2007, Hydro One developed an ACA to GIS extract-transform-load (ETL) tool, which facilitated the transfer of the field collected Distribution facility data into an ArcFM Electric Staging GIS as fully network connected features. We then began transferring the data from the tabular ACA database into the Staging geodatabase, on a per feeder basis, followed by post-processing and QA to ensure correct network connectivity and data quality. This work is also nearing completion, in-line with the field data collection

11 Underground Facilities data Concurrently, we completed a separate CAD to GIS Data Conversion program for Underground Distribution facilities data. There are about 2500 residential subdivisions across the system, and most of these had been captured as CAD format engineering layout drawings, which generally had the required accuracy for our Staging GIS. An external Data Conversion service provider completed this work, using georeferencing and precision placement rules to align the facilities with our GIS parcel landbase layers

12 Staging GIS limitations, and Current State The principal challenge to this data loading effort in the Staging GIS is that field changes completed after the data collection for a specific feeder did not get automatically imported into this GIS. Therefore, while Staging is now a spatially accurate Distribution facility repository, it has some currency challenges, with some (relatively small amount) data potentially as much as 6 years out of date From the outset, the purpose of the Staging GIS instance was to faciltate data conversion and QA, and it has been non-transactional from a business process perspective

13 I mentioned earlier that Hydro One has other GIS instances with Distribution facilities data Understanding that the data collection program would take years to fully populate a Distribution GIS, Hydro One decided in 2003 to implement a new design and layout tool using a Green fields approach essentially a GIS- landbase view on which to design new Distribution facilities, Customer connections, etc. Rolled out to 250 field design technicians the following year, ArcFM Mobile Designer was the first implementation of its kind. It used Hydro One s pre-existing Enterprise Geographic Information System (EGIS), which contained landbase and some Transmission ROW information, but no Distribution data - with the concept that facility data would be populated over time as new construction was completed and facilities were captured as part of the design posting process

14 Distribution data in EGIS today While the ArcFM Designer in EGIS worked well in principal, and has become a business critical system for estimating costs and connecting customers, practically speaking most of the Distribution facility data captured has been for service transformers and wires at customer connection points (as well as for some larger projects). Today, after 6 years of use, this GIS instance contains a considerable amount of this designed and as-built information, but does not provide anywhere near complete coverage of Hydro One s Distribution facilities. Hence it cannot support the variety of essential business processes (such as providing source data for OMS, DMS, or for Distribution Planning)

15 Outage Management at Hydro One it also runs on GIS Another Business-critical Distribution GIS instance exists at Hydro One: GORMS. In the early 2000 s due to pressing Outage Management operational requirements, and in the absence of a populated Distribution GIS, Hydro One developed a quasi-spatial distribution network model built by georeferencing and digitizing some key features from our CADformat Distribution Operating Maps. This network-traceable electric dataset was originally hosted off-site and extractions were provided on a regular basis that were used to drive the Hydro One OMS application. By 2005, the data had been brought in-house and is now maintained in a stand-alone ArcFM GIS instance, which is connected to a dedicated extraction tool for OMS

16 GORMS Limitations The GORMS GIS instance contains complete coverage for the province with good currency, but it lacks real-world spatial orientation and is more schematic in nature. Also limiting: this GIS contains no detailed attribute data for conductors, or facilities beyond the service transformers (secondary services or smart meters). Hence it is not useful for detailed electric system modeling (power flows, voltage levels) as needed for Distribution Planning and Distribution Management System operation

17 Smart Meters in GIS Hydro One also has spatial data for over 1.3 million installed smart meters, as well as thousands of repeaters and collectors. This data is currently stored in a separate GIS dataset, which is updated nightly from a meter installation repository. This data is not currently related to the rest of the Distribution data in any of our Distribution GIS instances. In order to fully accomplish business objectives, Hydro One will need to consolidate the smart meter spatial data with the rest of the Distribution network data

18 Distributed Generation in GIS Distributed Generators are being connected to the Hydro One Distribution feeders at an accelerating rate, causing increased operational complexity. From large wind farms to rooftop solar PV, approximately 3000 DG s have been connected in the past few years. Hydro One Networks is currently using the various GIS instances to map and model these additional energization sources for use in feeder studies and OMS, and will need to consolidate this spatial data with the rest of the distribution network data

19 and now: Final Destination Final Destination GIS is the working name for Hydro One s current consolidation of these various Distribution GIS datasets. Moreover, Final Destination GIS will be a fully supported, fully connected enterprise system... Numerous interfaces will be reconfigured from their current silos to point to FD GIS, and business processes which trigger data flows affecting GIS data are being developed and/or repointed to FD GIS. We will derive operational efficiencies through coordinated data updates, and reduced overlapping data maintenance processes. The resulting single source of truth will provide increased confidence in the quality and consistency of the data

20 The Consolidation Project the first decision After reviewing our options, the Staging GIS was chosen to be the foundation for Final Destination GIS; it would be the base for consolidating siloed data from the other data sources. Two key reasons: 1. Staging has the highest level of spatial accuracy, and attribute completeness of the 3 current GIS instances 2. and because Staging is currently non-transactional, no business-critical processes would be impacted during the systems and data consolidation work

21 Final Destination GIS: a Two Phased Consolidation Approach Phase 1 - Hydro One is well along in the consolidation of the ArcFM Designer system (within EGIS) with the Staging GIS. There are 2 main components: i. Data conflation bringing more up to date Distribution facility data from the recent ArcFM designs into the Staging GIS, and making the appropriate Distribution ii. network adjustments and connections. Systems consolidation the ArcFM Designer system has links to our Work Management System and CIS. These interfaces are being replicated for FD GIS, so that upon complete consolidation, our field technicians Designer tablets can be switched over to work with the updated FD GIS data. First Big Benefit No more Green field designs - The technicians will be able to see and work with the actual facilities data in detail within the mobile Designer application

22 Also in Phase 1 Phase 1 includes some degree of business process redesign in addition to the actual technical effort in consolidating these systems and data example: field redlining map update processes now use FDGIS data and applications as a base, instead of our previous CAD map redlining tools Our Smart Meter data consolidation, scheduled for completion this year, brings this important dataset into the connected Distribution network model. Upon completion in late 2011, we will have: an operational FD GIS installation with consolidated data replacing 2 of our siloed GIS s (EGIS and Staging); plus Smart Meters & DG s the data model will have been reviewed, consolidated and stakeholdered; with a change management body governing any future changes to the schema, in order to provide stability to the data editing / consuming environments

23 FD Phase 2 GORMS Consolidation This phase of the work is just beginning, with the assistance of an external Data Services provider, and is planned to be completed within the next months. Similar to Phase 1, there will again be two major components to this work: i. Data conflation bringing any additional up to date Distribution facility data from the GORMS GIS into the FD GIS, and confirming appropriate Distribution network connections, switch status, open point locations, etc ii. Systems & Processes consolidation the GORMS GIS is linked to a custom ETL tool which supplies data to the Hydro One Outage Management environment. This interface will be modified and replicated for FD GIS, along with its data update triggers and processes, so that once completed, the OMS can be switched over to work with the FD GIS data

24 GORMS/FDGIS Consolidation considerations The Outage Management System is an operational system in which a current normal state of the network must be maintained at all times in order to safely and accurately operate the Distribution System. To minimize risks of data loss or corruption during the consolidation, our current expectation is that data consolidation will be completed on a feeder-by-feeder basis. During the actual work, we will have some (completed) feeders fed to OMS from FDGIS, while those (yet to be completed) will continue to be fed from GORMS Hence 2 versions of the extractor tool may be in use simultaneously

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