Elsevier

Data & Knowledge Engineering

Volume 105, September 2016, Pages 23-38
Data & Knowledge Engineering

Enterprise integration solution for power supply company based on GeoNis interoperability framework

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.datak.2015.10.001Get rights and content

Abstract

Throughout the years, electric power utility companies have been relying on their massive multibillion worth infrastructure in the form of electric power network. Control and maintenance of the network has been usually done through a set of isolated systems where each one of them was in charge for their own subset of data. Latest changes in the market, imposed by deregulation and its opening have pushed electric power utility companies into major changes in their ICT infrastructure. Dynamism of the network that the upcoming Smart Grid concept will introduce requires better collaboration and information sharing among different systems within such companies.

PD Jugoistok, electric power utility company of the south-eastern Serbia is not an exception to this trend. On the contrary, PD Jugoistok has taken the first steps towards the Smart Grid by implementing enterprise integration of its information systems. The introduced enterprise integration relies on the GeoNis integration platform which uses translators/wrappers in order to map each existing data model into the common model partially based on the CIM defined in IEC 61968 series of standards. Solution implemented within PD Jugoistok uses WebGIS Portal as a central point of access to the integrated information for all possible users within the company or among external partners and regulatory bodies. The use of WebGIS Portal is based on the unique possibility of GIS to provide information in the spatial context thus properly abstracting the geographically dispersed nature of the electric power network.

Introduction

Electric power utility companies are lately challenged with increasing competition in both electricity production and electric power distribution domains. The fact that the market changes from a monopolized into a highly competitive one is driven by its deregulation which has already been introduced in EU and is starting to be introduced in Serbia as well. These challenges are forcing electric power utility companies to strive towards improving the effectiveness of their operations, improved quality and reliability of electricity supply, reduced losses which should lead to customer's satisfaction and long term contracts with consumers. In order to improve these processes, electric power utility company needs a number of different information systems, especially those that relate to electric power distribution network, its monitoring and various analyses on its day-to-day operation.

PD Jugoistok, responsible for power management of southeast Serbia as one of the five regional, government owned, electric power utility companies in Serbia, is not an exception to this trend. On the contrary, PD Jugoistok plans ahead and is trying to leverage its ICT capacity through integration of various information systems used within the company in order to be prepared for the changes that are already taking place on the market and will continue to do so in the following years.

Given the fast development within the field of information and communication technologies, users of contemporary information systems have large quantities of information at their disposal. Today's information systems have the ability of working with information from a large number of distributed and heterogeneous information sources. Such information systems in PD Jugoistok can include databases, email, information from various devices, meters, sensors and network management and analysing systems. These information systems have constantly being introduced throughout the company history and have led to the fact that almost every working position in PD Jugoistok is equipped with computer. As a consequence, there is an ever-rising quantity of data, which are generated on daily basis through different processes such as responding to consumers' requests, regulatory bodies and market demand, both energy and financial.

However, contemporary state of the affairs in PD Jugoistok is such that each information system in enterprise is dependent on the data available local to it. Information systems and applications that are used in various parts of the company for electricity distribution such as PD Jugoistok, have been developed for specific need within a company. Such information systems usually operate completely independent of the other information systems and generate local subsets of information. All these local subsets are controlled by the company department that owns or uses the information system that generated them. Usually, such information systems are only used by the employees within specific company departments for which that information system has been developed for. Possibility of integrating such local subsets of information would provide employees at the enterprise level with the means of executing complex analyses regarding company operations, leading to the overall company effectiveness.

Nevertheless, with development of the business, such companies are also developing new business processes which are requiring different inputs from different company functional parts. Reliable operations of the electricity distribution network as well as the activities on the market are demanding data from majority of the available information systems on the company level. Each information system vendor, be it an external partner or the PD Jugoistok internal ICT department, has implemented information system based on the requirements of the one specific company department. During and after development, usually each vendor needed to change the system for the new business changes and processes. In order to accommodate each new change in the business process that related to their department, each department was trying to push the changes into the information system that they were working with, in order to cover a larger set of different users' requirements, different set of functionalities and different data usage. This way, most of the existing systems were introduced into operation like Automatic Meter Reading system (AMR), Distribution Management System (DMS), SCADA systems, Document Management System (DocMS), Geographic Information System (GIS) as well as the other systems for real-time data monitoring.

Continuing development of these systems into direction of constantly covering new users' requirements, which are usually covered in the system which operates in different department, would lead to the existence of one huge information system. Such monolithic information system would become hard to be changed and further improved which would render its maintenance almost impossible. Also, this would make the company dependent of only one software vendor which could in long term jeopardize the company operations.

In order to prevent such scenario, we have made development of the existing systems as well as implementation of the new systems easier and provided the possibility for each information system to focus on its comparative advantage. The approach was to provide the process of integration of the systems into a single entity but also keep them independent and in charge of its own data set.

The end goal of such integration would be eventually moving to Smart Grid. But, this article is not about how-to realize Smart Grid. We present our integration approach which is next step in process of transforming of the power supply company from decentralized, heterogeneous environment of different non-interoperable information systems to fully interoperable environment as a basis for future realization of Smart Grid. Such integration that Smart Grid is trying to achieve would lead to more efficient, reliable and sustainable production and distribution of electricity. In order to accomplish the goals set by the Smart Grid, information integration is the key. Functioning of the Smart Grid will require huge amount of data from existing information systems, sensors, smart consumer devices, plug-in electricity producers and a number of different inputs. If electric power utility companies do not direct their efforts into information integration, implementation of the Smart Grid will not be possible in the near future.

Section snippets

Related work

The major responsibility of electric power supply companies is a continuous management of energy usage over wide areas. Aside from managing large-scale power delivery infrastructure, power supply companies rely on a highly utilized Enterprise Information Systems (EISs) for internal business procedures. On a single power supply company level, daily business procedures include monitoring and management of power delivery infrastructure. For this reason, Enterprise Information Systems are typically

Motivation for research

As stated in the related work, information integration in power supply companies such as PD Jugoistok is something which is a logical consequence of their constant development and the rising need for providing better quality of the service for the customers. Implementation of the Smart Grid inherently means implementation of the information integration and systems interoperability. Smart Grid as a technology, relates to a number of different fields starting from Integrated Communication and

Prerequisites for information integration in power supply enterprise

Nowadays, power supply enterprises are demanding the integration of disparate systems and applications in order to satisfy their business requirements and needs. The importance of enterprise integration in power supply companies is obvious. Enterprise application integration is a very important part of such process of integration over different systems, which acts as one entity, no matter where the systems are located. The most influential factor for success of EAI is integration functionality

Solution for enterprise integration in PD Jugoistok

Solution for enterprise integration within the power supply company PD Jugoistok, which is presented in this paper, uses GeoNis as a platform in order to implement the integration. Fig. 1 shows the architecture of the enterprise integration approach that we have used within the company PD Jugoistok. The systems are logically divided by their roles within the company into the Back-office systems and Front-Office systems.

Back-Office systems are those that are used for assets tracking, financial

GIS as foundation for enterprise integration

The fact that electric distribution network is usually built during decades and contains expensive equipment as well as the notion that it is the most important asset of the electric power distribution company since it provides its core business, the quality and the quantity of data related to it is of the highest importance to the company PD Jugoistok as well. Being geographically dispersed by its nature, storing data about the electric power distribution network into the GIS in the form of

Use case: calculation of low voltage network losses

Reduction of electricity losses in distribution network has become one of the priority objectives of the companies involved in distribution of electricity. A significant part of the losses in electricity distribution refers to the low voltage (LV) network losses. Procedures for calculation of losses in the LV network are generally known and defined in the literature [40], but their implementation in practice imposes a problem: availability of data for performing a calculation. The data

Current state of the project development

Company PD Jugoistok Niš was founded in the year 2005 after merging of the four four public companies for distribution of the electricity that were based in the cities of Niš, Leskovac, Vranje and Zaječar. It covers the territory of 40 municipalities with 1723 cities and villages, with around 21,600 square meters. It operates electric power distribution network with more than 35,000 km in length, with around 6000 substations and little more than 600.000 register consumers of electricity. PD

Conclusion

Electric power utility companies are very specific companies in terms of their development since they are managing infrastructure that is usually worth billions of dollars and that was usually being built over decades. This fact usually dictates the speed of their adaptability. In such companies, assets in the form of the electric power distribution network are representing their unique source of monopoly making them safe and secure from the challenges posed by the market. On the other hand,

Acknowledgement

This research is supported and granted by power supply company PD Jugoistok, Niš, Serbia.

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