National 2016 voting station outage map

Transcription

1 National 2016 voting station outage map by Gerhard Brits, Keagen Liebenberg and Shaun Goodbrand, Eskom Abstract The ability to manage outage on the Eskom network, not only when there are major national events such as the local government elections on 3 August 2016, requires management to have a consolidated view of the state of network outages nationally. To provide this overview, web GIS technology is perfectly suited to be the platform on which a national picture of outages and consolidate information from various sources can be formed. This provides the user with a platform that is simple to use and rich in content. The project was able to leverage current available information from existing systems to drive the geographic visualisation of the information captured in separate systems. The project was also able to develop the solution over a short period of time. This enabled the team to develop the application is and Agile fashion and provide a solution using existing functionality in the software and systems. A key output of the project has been that issues around data maintenance and quality have been highlighted. These issues have previously gone unnoticed and can now be identified and resolved. Keywords elections, outages, visualisation, business intelligence, oracle Introduction On the day of the 2016 local government elections, all voting stations needed to be operational and to have access to basic services. One of these services is access to electricity. Eskom management needed to have a bird s eye view of the state of outages on the electricity network and how those outages were affecting voting stations. The goal was to ensure that there were as few electricity interruptions as possible on the day of the election at voting stations. To enable access to the required information, data captured on other systems in Eskom was spatially visualised so that one could identify outages on the Eskom network. A web application was set up that allows the publishing of spatial data at regular intervals to stakeholders. The application required a form of integration with other systems, had to be created in a short space of time and needed to be flexible so that ever-changing user requirements could be met. The requirement Eskom required a method of visualising the outages on the electrical network. This information is captured in two separate systems. The one system contains information of multiple customer outages (FMS) and the other system contains information of single customer outages (CC&I). Multiple customer outages are larger faults which can either be forced events or planned work on the network. Single customer outages are reported by individual customers, either through an Eskom contact centre or on the My Eskom application. Solving the problem Even though the requirement seemed simple, the technical team was left with very little time to complete the project. From start to finish, the team had five days to complete and needed to deliver a stable and reliable solution. One of the major advantages was that the data required was already available in the organisation and this had to be leveraged to provide the intended output. Accessing fault data Accessing the outage information was done by connecting to Eskom s Spatial Database Solution (SDS) datasets which are based on Oracle 12c. The FMS and CC&I systems both use Oracle databases to store data. From FMS, one ad hoc table was populated with multiple customer faults. Fig. 1 shows the table design and the columns extracted from the parent system (FMS). The data was extracted and loaded into the SDS database via a scheduled Oracle job which is run every 30 minutes. The source of the data contains latitudes and longitudes for faults that are at substations or customer supply points. These co-ordinates were used to recreate SDO_POINT geometries using the Oracle Spatial spatial datatype (SDO_GEOMTERY). 96

2 In cases where there are no co-ordinates supplied, it can be inferred that there is a line fault recorded in the system. Because of the integration of SmallWorld with other business systems, a location ID is linked to all faults. The location ID is the ROOT_CAUSE_LOC column in Fig. 1. We are able to link the fault to the line once again using SDO_GEOMETRY to store the geometry in question. The spatial data for line faults is sourced by using a view on the medium voltage (MV) line table shown in Fig. 2. Using the ROOT_CAUSE_LOC and the OHL_PSID column from the MV line dataset, the view only shows the lines that contain a fault. Fig. 1: Multiple customer table design. Fig. 2: Line ID table. In the case of single customer faults, the geometry is also rebuilt using the built-in Oracle SDO_POINT datatype. Fig. 3 shows the design of the table. The CC&I system contains, in some cases, a customer location and an equipment location which is always provided. However, in cases where the customer location is not populated, the equipment location is used. To create a link between the faults and the voting stations, the closest point of supply was associated with the voting stations. This was not correct in all cases, but this was seen as an acceptable error. The location ID of the supply point was added to the voting stations. The location ID was matched to any single customer fault that contained the same ID. This allows us to visualise which voting station has reported a supply issue. 97

3 Making business data spatially available Fig. 3: Single customer faults table design. The solution that was provided relies on ESRI technology to provide the users with a web application that displays the spatial information created in the above section. Firstly ArcGIS for Server is used to host web services that are exposed to both desktop as well as web clients. In Fig. 4, the web layer software topology is visualised. We used ArcGIS for Server 10.3 to publish services. The tables were published in one service, making changes to the service easier and allowing for simpler management. These services are then hosted on Portal for ArcGIS. Portal for ArcGIS in Eskom currently hosts a large amount of data which can be used for a variety of tasks. The portal allows us to mash up layers to suit every application. Combining this with ArcGIS Web App Builder allows us to create application-specific tools from maps that can be changed at the click of a button. The combination of these software utilities provides a very agile environment that allows the team to respond to user requirements in a timely manner. ArcGIS for Server Portal for ArcGIS ArcGIS Web App Builder Fig. 4: Software topology. Distribution business forced and planned outage map The intent was to create a simple-to-use user interface that contains the information required by users (see Fig. 5). In the web application, we leverage as much as possible from existing services that are available from the standard base maps to standard web maps for the Eskom network and management areas (see Fig. 6). 98

4 Fig. 5: Web application. Fig. 6: Existing layers. The information we can now provide can give management information on the possible number of customers affected and what voting station is affected by an outage as shown in Fig. 7. As part of the outputs, multiple customer planned and forced outages are shown (along with all the required supplementary data) for both the current day as well as for ten days prior to the current date. All open single customer outages are shown. In the application, the report data is shown with the duration of the fault and feedback that is provided by field staff. Management will then be able to track an outage from start to finish using the application. 99

5 Fig. 7: Outage information. Project findings While developing the application, the team uncovered some areas of concern around the data captured by responsible parties. Chief among these findings is that stakeholders do not maintain the data accurately in all cases. This means that, in some cases, closed faults have been left open for an extended period of time. The tracing of affected customers also needs to be done more accurately so that the number of affected customers can be determined in all cases. Acknowledgements Team members of the project. Contact Gerhard Brits, Eskom, Tel , 100