East Midlands Electricity (now e.on) is one of the UK's leading Distribution Asset Managers, responsible for providing a reliable electricity supply to customers across an area totaling 16,000 km², serving 2.3 million customers through a distribution network that has 24,009 km of overhead line and over 44,000 km of underground cable. Deregulation of the electricity supply industry and new legal KPIs required EME to transform the way it managed the distribution network to improve service levels to customers whilst reducing operating costs.
EME adopted GE Smallworld GIS as the platform for the distribution management system. A series of customised applications were developed to capture existing enfineering data from physical media into digital form and to manage the data and operations into the future. A very rich Object Oriented data model was developed encapsulating asset attributes and behavior for all network components - to the extent that predictive simulation modelling could be performed to identify faults on the nertwork. Models enable network data to be represented in a variety of user centric ways such as true geoghraphic for field staff, schematic for control room operations, and geo-schematic for drivers. The system was integrated with network design, inspection & maintenance, outage management, SCADA, and customer information systems. Smallworld spatial replication enables data from all regional offices to be accessed as a complete set. Regional offices provided strong support in adopting the standards of the corporate asset data model, symbology and maps/plans.