WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT, ELECTRIC UTILITIES STRUGGLE TO FIND WAYS TO RESTORE POWER EFFICIENTLY — just as they have been ever since Thomas Edison successfully lit that first lightbulb in 1879.

In recent years, outage management systems (OMS), once known as trouble call analysis (TCA), have seen major contributions from information technology and automation. These systems allow electric utilities to better manage outage calls, locate outage devices, dispatch crews and report on historical reliability data. Prior to the 1990s, some utilities implemented homegrown or tabular-based systems, but most organizations continued to use paper or manual methods for power restoration. It wasn't until the mid-1990s, when OMS was truly integrated with the database and graphics of geographic information systems (GIS), that OMS started to have an impact on the electric utility industry.

Kissimmee Utility Authority (KUA; Kissimmee, Florida, U.S.), which serves 63,000 customers in central Florida, bought into the concept of OMS in 1997. The lessons learned since then have helped KUA to optimize power restoration, implement outage prevention and serve its customers more effectively and efficiently.

THE WAY IT WAS

Before its introduction to OMS, KUA handled outages much the same way it had for decades. Call takers documented details about each call on a paper outage ticket. Tickets were grouped by geographic region, substation or circuit, and then flagged on a map for dispatchers, engineers, crew supervisors and management to review and make action determinations. Crews were dispatched to the general area of the outage calls in an effort to troubleshoot the problem in the field.

Once the crews believed they had restored power, they sent the tickets back to the call takers to perform customer callbacks to confirm that power had been restored. This traditional process was thought to be decently effective. By today's standards, however, it was grossly inaccurate, inefficient and required way too much human involvement. Customer counts and durations were based on rough guesses that weren't fully determined until perhaps weeks after an outage had been resolved. The process of grouping outage tickets required someone with a good knowledge of the service area. The line crew worked outages using paper maps, which had sometimes become outdated as soon as they had been printed.

The line crew, much like the office personnel, had to possess a great deal of knowledge regarding the distribution system to work an outage effectively, always calling upon memory. This became more difficult as the typical overhead construction made way for extensive underground systems, which made a working knowledge of the system nearly humanly impossible to recall. Another problem was that KUA's more experienced employees, who had the best knowledge of the utility's system, were starting to retire. It was for all of these reasons that KUA looked to OMS.

SEARCH FOR A BETTER WAY

By 1993, KUA's Engineering & Operations department had long since implemented a successful AutoCAD-based automated mapping/facilities management (AM/FM) system and map-viewing software for the office. When the third-party development company ceased support for these products, the utility was forced to move in a different direction. After a thorough review of the industry at that time, KUA decided to go into production with a suite of electric GIS applications from Gentry Systems. These applications were AutoCAD-based as well, so users still had a significant understanding of how to use the system.

As Gentry Systems expanded its product offering to include additional solutions such as utility design and map viewing for the field, KUA was first in line to take advantage of these offerings. Gentry Systems later released a revamped tabular-based TCA system called GenTCA. The system was demonstrated to fully integrate with a major interactive voice response (IVR) system. KUA immediately bought into the concept of both products and implemented them on Oct. 1, 1997. Little did KUA realize at the time, but its service area was about to encounter nature's destructive ways, the results of which would leave thousands without power for days.

TEST BY TORNADO

On the evening of Feb. 22, 1998, and the following morning, less than five months after KUA's OMS and IVR deployment, central Florida encountered a disastrous night of severe storms. With these storms came deadly and destructive tornadoes, the most powerful of which split the KUA service area in half and left 39 people dead, 26 of whom were in the Kissimmee area alone. Additionally, some 250 people were injured and 1700 residences were left uninhabitable. KUA's electric infrastructure was dealt a tremendous blow resulting in 11,000 customers without power. Kissimmee and surrounding areas were deemed national disaster areas.

That morning a beta release of GenTCA was brought online that used AutoCAD as a graphical user interface (GUI) to the GenTCA. Immediately, the outage that had been only numbers on a screen came to life as calls, and predicted outage devices were overlaid on a map of the Kissimmee area. The extent of the outages could clearly be identified and ironically followed the path of the tornado, as it was later plotted on GIS maps. During the five-day restoration effort, KUA used GIS, OMS and IVR technologies to restore power to its customers. In KUA's opinion, the venture into OMS was justified and deemed a success.

A CHANGE OF VENDORS

OMS at KUA continued to excel for several years, but a major setback was on the horizon. In 2002, a larger company acquired Gentry Systems. As a result of the acquisition, GenTCA was dropped as a supported application. KUA continued to use the application, along with the suite of GIS products, while beginning its search for the next generation of GIS and OMS products. Ultimately, that search led the utility to Telvent Miner & Miner's (M&M; Ft. Collins, Colorado, U.S.) Arc-FM Solution for GIS and Responder for OMS.

KUA's decision to use the Responder system as a replacement for its OMS was based on several key elements. The first was M&M's concept of building an OMS on the same database as the GIS. Conceptually, if a change occurred to the GIS, then that modification could be available automatically to the OMS for call entry, outage prediction, incident creation and eventually customer callback. This was a vast improvement over the prior system, which required a periodic export of data out from the GIS and an import into the OMS. This process was time consuming and left the OMS data not as current as it could or should have been. The second benefit of the Responder system was that the OMS used ESRI's (Redlands, California, U.S.) ArcGIS software as its graphics engine.

KUA's research had indicated ArcGIS was the core GIS application that would position the utility for the future. The ArcFM Solution, running on top of ArcGIS, uses a geometric network to maintain electrical connectivity, which is used across all M&M applications, including Responder. Everything pointed to this product being the answer to the utility's current dilemma. The only problem was that the Responder did not exist yet. It would require a tremendous leap of faith for KUA to move forward with replacing its GIS, utility design system and GIS viewers for the field and the office, based on the hope that M&M would be able to produce the product required for OMS in an acceptable time frame.

In the second quarter of 2003, KUA made that leap and purchased M&M's entire suite of products. The conversion of all applications was performed internally by KUA's GIS division and was later honored with ESRI's Special Achievement in GIS award for the effort. The goal was to have all applications converted to the ArcFM Solution and be ready for Responder by the end of the year. In December of the same year, right on schedule, M&M's Responder Development Team arrived at KUA to install and configure the first beta release of the new Responder software. After a three-day installation and configuration period, the product was functional and appeared to perform within acceptable parameters right out of the gate.

The goal to replace the old GenTCA system with a new and completely integrated Responder OMS required significant internal effort as well. The system had to be configured and customized to the utility's standards and extensive testing had to be conducted to ensure the end results were acceptable. Training of dispatchers and call takers throughout the organization was also an internal effort. All this had to be accomplished in a two-week period in order for the Responder system to go live at midnight on Jan. 1, 2004. That goal was attained largely because KUA was not new to OMS. Change-management issues had a far greater impact on KUA's initial conversion from paper to GenTCA than on its conversion from GenTCA to Responder. In fact, users from call takers to dispatchers found the system more user friendly than the previous system on nearly every point.

Initial releases of the product were beta releases, so it was understandable there were issues that needed to be resolved along the way. The next year was a year of product refinement, mostly at the guidance of the Early Adopter Team, which consisted of several electric utilities that were taking the same leap of faith as KUA. Responder reached final release in October 2005, resulting in a mature, fully functional OMS.

KUA holds an annual mock outage drill known as Disaster Drill Day. Ironically, this drill is held on or around All Fools' Day (April 1) each year. The annual event is intended to test employees and outage systems to ensure they are running optimally prior to the start of hurricane season. For two years following the Responder deployment, M&M was invited and attended the drills. With each drill, the development team observed, reviewed and developed solutions that would determine the direction of the product. Year after year, as each drill was completed, there became less and less to be addressed.

TEST BY HURRICANE

The results of KUA's Responder implementation were believed to have met every goal; however, three true tests occurred between Aug. 13 and Sept. 30, 2004. The tests came in the form of hurricanes Charley, Jeanne and Frances. All three storms struck central Florida within that six-week period. The KUA service territory was severely impacted by the first hurricane, Charley. The result of the storm was a 14-day restoration effort, including the replacement of hundreds of distribution poles and transformers, 31 miles (50 km) of distribution conductor and 7.5 (12 km) circuit miles of transmission infrastructure, including 74 transmission structures. From the first hurricane to the last one, Responder performed admirably. Call takers were organized in an Outage Call Center and used Responder's call-entry web form to communicate with customers. The management team used Responder outage graphics and data to determine the best way to dispatch crews and restore power to KUA customers.

THE FUTURE

KUA's Responder deployment continues to be successful. Internal efforts are underway to expand OMS even further. Outage data that is used and analyzed in the office soon will be made available to field laptops, in addition to the GIS viewing system (ArcFM Viewer for ArcEngine) that KUA has currently. This data will be available via wireless so that line crews can use the same information in the event of an outage situation. Vehicle-tracking data will be obtained from onboard GPS units in KUA vehicles and sent back to a central database to aid in crew dispatch.

All those years ago, Thomas Edison could not have imagined the extent and effort future electric utilities would undertake to keep the lights burning. KUA's investment in OMS has been extensive during the last decade. And it was not until KUA migrated to M&M's Responder that the utility truly became productive with OMS. If KUA had faced the 2004 hurricanes with its old system, or without an OMS at all, the restoration effort would have been significantly longer and more difficult.

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Ken Beville is the manager of the GIS division in the Engineering & Operations department. He has been with the Kissimmee Utility Authority for 22 years. Beville has served on the Florida Municipal Electric Association GIS Committee and the Gentry Systems User Group Committee. He shared in the 2005 Special Achievement in GIS award that KUA received from ESRI. KBEVILLE@kua.com